The Cocoon blog

“500 Gem ready” is the phrase Heather Dunn uses when she is thinking and talking about scaling. After joining the team as Chief People Officer in late 2021, her first task was to look at every stage of the employee lifecycle. Over 45 days, she talked to every single Gem employee to determine current state, future state, and what gaps the people team needed to fill. 

Her goal? “To get every People program, process, and experience ready for when we are 500 Gems.” Some processes, like onboarding, Heather knew she needed to tackle head-on. For others, she said she was “in a fortunate position that the company had invested in People early and laid a great foundation.”

Managing leave at scale

Gem’s People team had already set employee leave up for success at scale when Heather joined. Lara Poncia, Director of Human Resources at Gem, was a one-person HR team when Gem was a 77-person organization, pre-Heather. 

One of the first things Lara asked when she joined the team was how Gem handled leaves. She said, “I researched and compared several different leave management providers and found the team at Cocoon to be the most knowledgeable.” 

Onboarding was smooth, with a dedicated customer success manager (CSM) walking Lara through the implementation process. Lara said, “[Our CSM] provided us with some great benchmarking data to help us understand what other companies at our stage and size were offer

The impact of leave on the employee experience

As a seasoned HR leader, Heather had lived through leave nightmares at other companies. She said, “I’ve had a couple of experiences where [my team] was using the best leave management tools available at the time and there was still always a common complaint. The process felt impersonal and people didn’t understand how to do it.” 

She described how harmful it can be when a leave goes badly, saying, “When someone's going through a huge life change, and they have confusion and anxiety about the process, it can absolutely be damaging to the relationship between that individual and the workplace.” 

“When someone's going through a huge life change, and they have confusion and anxiety about the process, it can absolutely be damaging to the relationship between that individual and the workplace.” 
_{- Heather Dunn, Chief People Officer @ Gem}

Always looking toward future-proofing for 500 Gems, Heather said, “I wanted us to be on the leading edge of what leave looks like. Let’s make this a differentiator for us and invest in a really thoughtful, thorough, articulated process and program.”

The importance of partnership 

The partnership the Gem team has with Cocoon leaves them feeling confident they’re set up for success now—and as the organization grows. Heather said, “We invested in Cocoon early [for Gem] in the sense that we’d probably only had one leave beforehand. Now, we have the process, program, and assurance that Cocoon will take care of our employees.” 

In addition to implementing changes based on Gem’s feedback, Cocoon also demonstrates partnership by guiding Gem toward competitive offerings based on data. 

“We want to learn what’s best in class for our size and stage and Cocoon has been an incredible thought partner in how to evolve our leave process. That’s so helpful for a people leader in a complicated, sensitive space,” Heather said. 

Enhanced employee experience and cross-functional collaboration

While the human aspect of leave is incredibly important, it’s also crucial to the employee experience that the logistics are taken care of, too. “I cannot overemphasize how painful it is,” Heather said of working with payroll without Cocoon. “We could never get it right. It’s important that someone knows they’ll get paid the right amount at the right time.”

With Cocoon, workflows are made simple for both People and payroll teams.

Heather said, “Without Cocoon, our payroll team could be sitting there trying to calculate what we pay versus what the government pays—that’s a nightmare. So there’s a huge impact not only on [the People team] but we’ve gained trust from our Finance team in the sense that we all understand exactly what Gem needs to pay and have the confidence we won’t make errors.”

Understand how your leave policies compare to Gem and 100+ other progressive employers with our 2023 employee leave benchmarks.

“Call Cocoon. I’m serious.”

After more than a decade as a progressive People leader, other People leaders turn to Heather all the time when it comes to advice about leave. Her response? 

“Call Cocoon. I’m serious. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of leave management companies that do about 60% of it. And Cocoon is solving the other 40% of that painful process. To me, that’s a no brainer.”

About Gem

Gem is an all-in-one recruiting platform that integrates with LinkedIn, Gmail & Outlook, and your applicant tracking system. It enables world-class recruiting teams to find, engage, and nurture top talent—all with best-in-class data integrity.

It is safe to say that employee expectations for work-life balance, office life, benefits, and manager interactions have changed forever with the pandemic. In order to stay ahead of the curve in the uber-competitive talent market we see today, organizations are reevaluating what role their seasoned leaders have in creating the employee experience the next generation needs to thrive at work. 

Last week, Cocoon’s COO, Lauren Dai, sat down with Carolyn Frey, Chief People Officer at Curology, and Q Hamirani, Global Head of People Operations at Airbnb for a conversation facilitated by PEER 150 to tackle the lofty question of how leaders can best to support their employees to deliver a world-class employee experience, foster loyalty and retention, and chart a course into the future of work.

Here are some of the learnings gleaned from these incredible people leaders around how they’re rethinking manager training and developing support systems that empathetically serve employees of all ages and backgrounds.

Tip: To access the full conversation, check out the full recording of the conversation here. 

Finding purpose in your work is everything

All of the panelists agreed that purpose at work has never been more important than it is now. For some people, that’s working for a mission-based organization or taking a role they feel has a meaningful larger impact. For many others, it’s choosing to work for an organization with values aligned with their own. 

Carolyn said, when all the bells and whistles [of the workplace] went away with COVID, work became naked. How people spend their time and who they spend it with, both personally and professionally, fell under a spotlight. And when people don’t like what they see, they’re more motivated to change something. Purpose seems to matter to everyone, regardless of where they are in life. 

Creating support systems for all team members

In partnering with so many forward-thinking leaders, Lauren observed how the pandemic has been a moment of significant empathy building between generations. Whether someone is having their first baby, taking care of a child home from school due to COVID exposure, or caring for elderly parents, the pandemic has impacted all of us. 

These different ends of the spectrum have helped create empathy between generations. From the employer perspective, organizations are realizing that competitive parental leave isn’t enough. A range of leave types and benefits demonstrates empathy by supporting all of your team members. What this looks like in practice will depend on your unique organization and demographics, but each panelist offered examples of how this works at their organization.

Curology builds support through trust and mandatory time off

At Curology, Carolyn’s team switched from unlimited PTO to mandatory minimum time off (MTO). Many teams can relate to the problem they were solving for: During the pandemic, with travel plans on hold, people weren’t taking time off. This led to widespread burnout and ultimately contributed to The Great Resignation. Carolyn emphasized the importance of setting the example from the top and leadership actually signing offline, not responding to emails, or calling into meetings when on MTO. 

Another way Curology builds support is by starting with a foundation of trust. While many leaders worried, and some still worry, about employees’ productivity while working from home, Carolyn emphasized the importance of trusting employees. She said, “If we don’t come out of this pandemic with the belief that people can work from home successfully, we have failed.” 

Airbnb supports its team with transparency and flexibility

From childcare cancellations to caring for sick family members, COVID has had a massive impact on every workplace in the U.S. In order to support its team members through the pandemic, Airbnb added 15 emergency days off on top of PTO for any pandemic-related activities (e.g. childcare or caregiving for a loved one), with wellbeing days on top of that. 

It’s important to recharge and find time for joy with PTO, and Q’s team knew that having to use vacation time for stressful situations would ultimately drain team resources and morale. 

Additionally, during the early days of the pandemic, Airbnb’s leadership team held Q&A sessions where team members could ask the CEO anything. Q said that nothing was sugar coated, and this transparency—even in the face of uncertainty and a constantly negative news cycle—helped build trust among the Airbnb team. 

Cocoon helps companies make the leave process stress-free for their employees

The importance of paid time off—both in terms of vacation time as well as longer term leave—came up a lot throughout the conversation. People take leaves during major life events, so how a company supports someone through the experience is crucial. 

Cocoon makes it easier to support team members through leave by handling compliance, payroll, and everything in between. Instead of spending time wading through paperwork, your team member on leave can focus on the reason they took time off in the first place.

Carolyn reiterated the support her team gets from Cocoon, emphasizing the importance of partnering with vendors that help you scale empathy within your organization. By making the leave process more seamless, she said it helps show employees that Curology cares about their personal lives and wants their leaves to be carefree and successful. 

Leading for the future of work

The future of work acknowledges that not everyone works in the same way, and supports people with empathy and flexibility. Q encouraged us to remember, however, that there’s a difference between empathy and entitlement. Leaders can listen to feedback without implementing everything employees ask for. The key is responding with transparency. 

Even without implementing everything employees say would improve their work experience, it’s possible to lead in a highly supportive way. 

Now more than ever, purpose is crucial in the workplace. People want workplaces that align with their personal values, and those are easier to create and maintain with empathy and flexibility. 

For more great tips on leading for the future of work, check out the full recording of the conversation here.

At Cocoon, we constantly talk to People leaders about the ways they approach progressive employee benefits. Adapting employee leave to fit modern priorities and families is something we hear time and again from the teams we work with. Making employee leave accessible and easy to manage is a great way for employers to demonstrate empathy and retain talent. Today, paid progressive parental and medical leave policies are table stakes—the most competitive employers are considering leaves that reimagine the modern workplace. 

What’s the difference between leave and PTO?

One question business leaders may ask when approached about increasing types of leave is, can’t people just use vacation time (PTO)? It’s important to stress that just about any reason someone would take a leave is a life changing one. Even joyful changes, like having a child, come with huge lifestyle adjustments that take time to figure out. Leaves like bereavement, for example, are by definition, very different from a vacation and should be viewed through a different lens. 

Giving people dedicated leave time enables them to adjust, grieve, or focus on the huge life change they are undertaking without worrying about the optics (i.e. it looks like they’re out on a weeks-long vacation) or using up valuable PTO which should be used to rest and recharge.

Benchmarking your employee leave policy 

Depending on the size of your organization and current leave policies, you may reevaluate leave at different intervals. We asked the people leader of a ~300 person company in the cannabis industry how her team approaches when and why it may be time to reevaluate leaves. 

The leader explained how her team may consider adjusting leave policies during an annual review, with a new fundraise, or simply when an idea is brought to the team. Additionally, she said, “Our team reviews feedback from our employee surveys, reviews benchmarks and articles, attends conferences, and reviews our employee population to see what leaves would be most beneficial for them today and in the near future. We also listen to our People Business Partners for trends they're noticing. We may reevaluate our policies as we see unique employee situations arise.”

Employees are involved in the process via survey feedback, and ultimately decisions are made with the people ops team and executive leadership. 

A good starting point may be determining what types of leave are common within organizations in your industry and/or that are similar in size.

Cocoon’s benchmarking data shows parental, medical, and caregiver leave policies broken down by company size and industry. Understanding how your peers approach leave helps ensure your offerings are competitive. 

Employee leave beyond parental and medical leave

Here are a few examples of types of leave modern employers are considering and implementing to retain top talent.

1. Pregnancy loss leave

One leave type we’re hearing about with increasing frequency is bereavement leave specifically for miscarriage. Pregnancy loss has long been shrouded with stigma but can be a very real and heartbreaking experience for expectant parents and one that traditionally, our society has done very little to acknowledge or honor. Depending on how far along the pregnancy was at time of loss, surgery may be required, so physical as well as emotional healing is important to consider when establishing how much time off to give for a miscarriage or pregnancy loss leave. 

2. Military family leave

Military family leave (different from military leave under USERRA) is probably the least-known FMLA leave type, but that doesn't mean it's not as critical as the others. Employees are entitled to job-protected time for two broad reasons:

1. Military caregiver leave: for employees who need to take care of a covered service member with a serious injury or illness.

2. Qualifying exigency leave: for employees who need time to handle urgent issues that have come up because of a family member’s active military duty or their impending call to serve.

While not required by law, many companies offer paid military family leave policies to empower employees to take the time they need (many companies also use Cocoon to manage these leaves, too).

3. Mental health or compassionate leave

Some companies are turning to designated mental health leave both to mitigate fraud around medical leave and acknowledge the importance of mental health in the workplace. One of the people leaders we spoke with mentioned that their organization is looking to implement both a four week mental health leave, as well as “compassionate leave” for people experiencing difficult life events such as navigating divorce. 

4. Caregiver leave

Modern companies are making an effort to make leave more inclusive for people of different backgrounds and at different life stages. For example, consider a caregiver leave that can be used to care for one’s children, but also to care for aging parents. Both situations can be stressful, emotional, and time—and energy—consuming, and it’s important to consider the needs of all team members, not just new parents. 

The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on the need for caregiver leave as so many people became caregivers school closures, illness, and travel restrictions turned so many people into caregivers overnight. The silver lining: employers are stepping up in a big way.

5. Gender affirmation leave

The people who will best inform what types of leave will be most welcome in your organization are your team members. One of our People leaders is in the process of finalizing leave to provide time off for employees who are transitioning. This can include time off for gender-affirming medical procedures, but also time off to address employees' mental health or legal requirements for finalizing transition.

Employees remember their leave experience

When it comes to progressive employee benefits, it’s no longer enough to offer paid parental leave. The pandemic has caused our personal and professional lives to merge like never before, and people value flexibility and work-life balance.

All of the leaves we’ve discussed—and there are plenty more important life changes we haven’t mentioned which might also require a leave—are around pivotal life moments. How employers treat people during these moments has a huge impact on how they will feel about your organization. Increasing loyalty and retention while treating team members with empathy and building mutual respect? Sounds like a win-win to us.

When I joined Stripe in early 2012 – when the company was just 10 people! – I was struck by how intentional and principled the team was about building both the product and the team. Through the years of intense growth, I saw these values repeated over and over again: knowledge sharing and learning, rigorous thinking, and an emphasis on end-to-end ownership that formed the backbone of the incredible culture and product excellence. 

Fast forward to today: we’re just getting started with Cocoon, and the customer and product momentum we’ve seen in our first year has been extraordinary. We went from launching in January 2021 to working with many of the fastest-growing companies in tech, including Notion, Carta, and Superhuman. 

The hardest part of building comes after you’ve found your initial product-market fit. How can you sustain a high quality bar of product, team, and culture for decades to come? Much of this revolves around having the right team of folks who care deeply about building the right product and company together (we’re hiring!), but we’re also spending a lot of time being thoughtful and deliberate about how we work. 

Here are some of the underpinnings of our early company culture. If any of these resonate, we’d love to work with you.
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We’re building something that matters

We’re not building software for software’s sake. Our product has a direct, positive impact on people’s lives, in an area in desperate need of something better. When Lauren, Mahima, and I first started hearing about “leave” and what a huge problem it was, we were baffled: how could something that seems so incredibly common be so painful? 

The status quo is not an experience we’d wish on anyone. We learned that going on any type of leave required hours of wading through government and insurance bureaucracy. These are some of the most emotionally exhausting moments of people's lives, and everyone had a nightmare story to tell—whether it was trying to find a fax machine in the hospital or calling into insurance hotlines at 7:59am every day hoping to get someone on the phone—and we wondered to ourselves why nobody had solved this.

That’s why we do what we do every day at Cocoon. When we hear feedback from users like: “I'm so grateful that I'm able to talk to someone about this. I've been holding it all in and have been so stressed, and I didn't know anyone who I could turn to about it”, we know we’re making a real, meaningful difference in their lives. 
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Everyone works on product

Being at Stripe for 8 years taught me a love of diving into messy, regulatory areas, and simplifying them into magical experiences, and that's exactly what we’re doing with Cocoon. 

Everyone’s deeply involved, whether you write code, design, sell, or directly support our users or team. We’re a team of doers who are excited to roll up our sleeves, dive into the nuts-and-bolts of how things work, and who thrive in having a high level of craftsmanship in everything we do. We obsess over the details, whether it’s getting that user experience, code abstraction, or copy just right. 

Most importantly, we’re all building this company together. 
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We debate (and reflect) without ego

We want to work with folks who are kind, open-minded, and generous, but who aren’t afraid to passionately debate for what they believe in or raise a concern. We care deeply about what we're working on, and we also have high trust and mutual respect for one another. While we may disagree and debate, we do it to push each other, our product, and company to the limits we know we’re capable of.

This also means that we trust our team to move quickly and make the right judgment calls for the company. When things break or we make a mistake, we strongly believe that these are due to a system (or lack thereof) that has failed a person, not the other way around. As a team, we highlight and examine things that went wrong (without blame or judgment) so we can learn from them and do better next time. 
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Transparent by default

We care about writing things down to force rigorous thinking and reflection, and enable better context and knowledge sharing. This helps us be radically transparent: we have open email lists and documentation, and share strategic context like board meetings notes and fundraising plans internally so everyone is empowered with the same information.

Without a strong, shared writing culture, information becomes siloed (even with the best of intentions!), goals become unclear or misaligned, and it’s hard to execute efficiently. Many companies default to adding more and more review or “sign-off” processes in order to make sure the right decisions get made, which is the opposite of the autonomous culture we want to build. 
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Our personal priorities come first

When Lauren, Mahima, and I first started talking about founding a company together, one understanding between the three of us was that work was not, and could not be, the most important thing in our lives. 

It’s not that we don’t care about what we’re working on, or can’t (or won’t) work hard. We’re extraordinarily ambitious about where we want to be and thrive in the work needed to see it through. 

However, nothing will ever be more important than our personal priorities. I had a baby six months into starting Cocoon—he’s now an energetic and demanding 8-month old who wants to eat everything—and I know that my family will always come first. Whether it’s someone else’s family, friends, pets, community, passions, or anything else, we’re building a culture where it’s okay to be transparent and explicit about the fact that those things should take priority above work.

Fundamentally, employee leave is about creating space in your work life to focus on whatever it is that’s going on in your personal life. That philosophy is ingrained in our day-to-day at Cocoon.  
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Come build the future of leave

If what we’re working on resonates with you and you’re excited about building this company together, we’d love to chat.

Nearly all leaves are due to a major event in someone’s life—having a baby, losing a loved one, undergoing surgery, and navigating mental health challenges are just some of the reasons someone may take a leave. That’s why it's important for managers to be thoughtful and intentional when welcoming someone back from leave.

Additionally, it costs 150% of someone’s salary to replace them, so there are also financial incentives for helping someone settle comfortably back into the workplace. Making sure an employee feels supported during this time is one of the best ways you can retain talent across your team.

Here are four tips for welcoming a team member back to work after a parental, medical, caregiver, or compassionate leave.

1. Review your company’s leave policies and create a 30-60-90 day plan

Whether or not you’ve taken a leave yourself, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the leave-taker, trying to imagine the stress they might feel before returning to work. Weeks or months of work have happened, including new hires, new projects, and maybe even new company goals or initiatives. Someone returning from a leave will likely have a ton of questions, and maybe even anxiety around the uncertainty. 

First, understand your company policies (review your employee handbook or set up a meeting with HR). Some companies may outline specific expectations for employees returning to work from a leave, or even have a return-to-work transition program. Affirm, for example, provides both birth and non-birth parents a 4-week ramp back program at full base pay. If someone is only coming in a few days a week for that first month, you’ll want to take that into consideration when building their 30-60-90 day plan (more on that later). 

After reviewing company policies, you can ease your team member’s swirling thoughts by taking the time to think through what they’ve actually missed. There will be time-sensitive updates and some that can wait a few days or weeks. Try to filter the information so as not to bombard them on their first day. 

Then, consider putting together a one-pager with any changes that have taken place within the team and organizations, and how projects have progressed during leave. You may want to review company policies for what you do and don’t need to share if any updates feel particularly sensitive (for example, if there were redundancies made during their time away).

Of course, your team member will be eager to see how they fit back into the fabric of the team and greater organization. Collaborate on a 30-60-90 day plan, as if they’re a new hire. Don’t expect them to jump right back in at their full capacity as they readjust and get caught up.

2. Listen with empathy and discuss boundaries

You can read all the advice on the internet and while you’ll likely find some helpful nuggets of information, nothing is as important as listening to your team member’s experience. Maybe after your parental leave, you felt intense brain fog and anxiety and dreaded ramping back up at work. But perhaps your team member views work as a welcome return to normality and is eager to jump right back into where they left off. Try not to make assumptions about what’s best for your employee upon their return.

Even before you share updates and create your 30-60-90 day plan, set up a one-on-one for their first day back. Ask direct and empathetic questions, and actually ask your team member how they want to approach coming back to work.

Also important to discuss: boundaries. While it may seem counterintuitive to help a team member set boundaries, having a mutual understanding of what these are and how to communicate them will be helpful to your entire team in the long run. Here are some ideas for phrases someone can use, which you might suggest if/when relevant:

• “I have a hard stop at XX time.”
• “I will not be available for the next 30 minutes.”
• “I won’t be able to join at this time, even with my video off.”
• “I can’t. I have to go pump.”

While these phrases may seem straightforward, actually communicating about what they mean and giving a sense of permission to use them can be helpful. If these don’t feel helpful or relevant, talk about other ways in which your team member can set effective and clear boundaries. 

It’s important, also, to manage your own expectations and lead with empathy—change is hard and they’ve likely just gone through a lot of changes in a relatively short period of time.

3. Rely on ERGs to build community

If your team member is open to it (remember to listen and minimize making assumptions), encourage them to seek community with others who may have recently taken a leave. For example, if they’re returning from a parental leave, you may want to highlight any parenting communities within your organization and encourage them to join if it feels appropriate. 

We spoke to working parents about what made a parenting employee resource group (ERG) a positive experience, and most agreed that it was helpful to have a safe space where their personal and professional lives could merge more openly. 

Olivia, a new mom working in HR for a software company, said, “I appreciate how the leaders of our parenting ERG send emails and Slack messages to managers when Covid cases are up. They notify them that schools may be closing and to check in with parents on their team to see if they need support. It’s also a great place for recommendations; it’s a safe space to ask about random things like portable baby monitors or a mask your 2-year-old won’t rip off.” 

Community is critical to feeling like they still belong within the company, and can even strengthen ties as they meet new people and engage in new sub-communities.

4. Ask questions across your team and organization

A team member’s leave impacts your whole team—and that includes you. You don’t have to know all the answers, lean on HR and other managers (either internally or externally) who have recently had employees go on leave, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. 

Additionally, be upfront with both your team members and organization leaders about adjusting expectations with reduced headcount. This is ideally a conversation that happens before someone goes on leave, but it’s worth having again when that person returns. 

Coming back from a leave can feel overwhelming, but there is a lot a manager can do to create a more seamless experience for their team members. From active listening to co-creating a back to work plan, welcoming someone back from leave is a team effort. ‍

Cocoon helps employees and their managers navigate every aspect of their leave, including their transition back to work. Learn how we can help support your team.

The Senate recently passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill focused on rebuilding roads and funding climate initiatives. Next up is a more debated venture: a social policy package that, among other policies, would include four weeks of paid family leave. Previously, 12 weeks of leave was proposed and then left out, making the four weeks a small win for Democrats but one which still places the U.S. far behind every other developed nation. The burden of this gap—and the fact that paid parental leave is still at risk before the social spending package is signed into law—now falls on the American employer. And as we’ve seen in recent weeks, it’s not necessarily something many corporations are prepared for. 

Companies of all sizes are impacted — even Amazon, which employs more than 1.3 million people. At the heart of the issue for the retail behemoth is paid and unpaid employee leaves. While policies exist on paper, in practice the process is far more complicated—workers have gone so far as to email Jeff Bezos personally to demand an explanation for incorrectly reduced pay checks during leave.

Amazon is not the only company facing fallout from complex leave policies and systems. And it isn’t just leave that’s creating tension between employees and companies, especially those experiencing high or rapid growth. A process that results in an employee spending their leave on the phone with insurance agents or, worse, not getting paid, is symptomatic of a fundamental disconnect between employers and the people who work for them. 

Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave, especially for large companies like Amazon, is table stakes for the modern and competitive employer. Executing leave—and the policies and benefits that support people in these critical life moments—efficiently and thoughtfully is the next frontier for employers. It isn’t just providing the right benefits on paper, it’s the follow through that counts; and as we’ve seen time and again throughout the Great Resignation, employees are demanding more care and attention. 2022 is the year of the empathetic employer, where the most people-forward companies will win when it comes to attracting and retaining talent. In working with people teams day in and day out, here are some of the trends I’m seeing which illustrate this demand for empathy.

1. Focus on inclusive and accessible family and medical leave

Because federally paid leave—if it becomes law—only covers a portion of income, employees will be forced to depend now more than ever on their employers when it comes to taking leave. And the basics  (e.g. medical leave for a surgery or maternity leave for having a baby) aren’t good enough.  In 2022, companies must recognize that leave can take many different forms, a departure from how they have historically implemented leave policies. This evolving understanding is crucial not only to the family unit, but to the workforce. Approaching leave policies with a people-forward approach might look for your company like taking a gender agnostic approach to time off, allowing leave for pregnancy loss and domestic abuse, and providing time off for the caregiving of aging parents. Historically, employers have thought of leave narrowly, but in reality, there are many reasons why someone may require a leave and modern employers must accommodate them. 

Again, having leave policies is crucial, but it’s not enough. Empathetic employers should focus on making leave transparent, accessible, and affordable. Imagine an individual faced with the urgent need to take care of a sick family member and doing mental gymnastics to navigate a web of federal, state, and employer policies.  First, employers must make it easy for that person to understand what leave benefits are actually available to them when it comes to time and pay. It’s surprising how often policies like medical or family leave are buried in employee handbooks, or not mentioned at all. It’s crucial to be upfront with employees about what they’re entitled to, and then make it easy for them to actually take the time. Doing the latter means taking all the administrative aspects off the employee’s plate, so instead of spending time following up on claims with state and disability providers and calculating pay, individuals can spend their time focused on the reason they actually took leave.

The big question for an employee after they’ve figured out what they’re entitled to for a leave, is assessing whether they can even afford to take the time. Having a paid leave policy (which can be supplemented by Biden’s proposed federal policy as well as state and disability policies) allows people to take time off in the moments that matter most to them. In most cases, having this paid time off during critical life moments allows them to come back to work feeling supported. Employers that understand the value of leave to their employees, and their broader team, will ensure that policies are accessible and transparent such that those who need them are able to use them—and get paid.

2. Be flexible—or prepare to lose employees to remote-forward companies

It’s no secret that the pandemic gave nearly everyone time and space to think about what matters most to them. For some, that means being nearer family, for others, it’s a new adventure and change of scenery. More than ever before, employees are either fully remote or working more days remotely, and to be competitive, employers need to accommodate this trend. This complicates logistics for employers, but the benefits of building trust by providing flexibility outweigh any costs.

One of the issues that led to Amazon’s inability to accurately and easily fulfill leaves is the age-old tech problem of disparate systems not working together to provide a seamless user experience. Most companies place a high degree of importance on finding, say, marketing software that is either a catch-all or works well with the team’s existing platforms. It’s important to place the same level of importance on cohesion when evaluating systems for benefits and leave, especially when you’re dealing with the complexity of people who work across state and country lines. 

3. Ask questions before you solve problems

Because empathy requires us to really listen and understand someone else’s experience, empathetic employers should approach benefits with the same mentality. Gone are the days of setting up a ping pong table or hosting a happy hour and assuming your employees are content and loyal. 

In a recent conversation with a CPO for a fully remote tech company, she shared how her team  facilitated listening sessions to understand the root of the company’s burnout problem. While initially it had been proposed to host several mental health days—a definitive 2021 trend—the CPO uncovered that it was the company’s norms and behaviors around communication and planning that were leading to burnout. Requests were too frequently coming in at the last minute, and there existed a culture of an always-on expectation to complete a task as soon as it lands in your inbox. Even if they had given employees a mental health day, the company culture was such that employees would have felt pressured to work through it. Instead, the company really listened to the issues contributing to employee burnout, and revamped processes for the way team members communicate. Truly listening is perhaps the most empathetic thing employers can do, especially in a changing work environment. 

While we can take the recent Amazon headlines at face value as a cautionary tale of what happens when employee leave falls through the cracks, there’s a larger lesson for employers. At its core, failing to pay employees on leave due to vastly complicated systems and processes is an issue with prioritizing people. When employers truly listen, they prioritize the well-being and needs of their employees, especially during the most important and critical times of their lives.

The pandemic created a crash course in adaptation unlike anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. From employees relocating to be nearer to family, to the mental health strains of always-on remote work and grief resulting from personal loss and a never ending negative newscycle, people have realized work is not just about paying the bills. This experience and subsequent realization has resulted in the Great Resignation. With so many people leaving their jobs in droves, people leaders are left to figure out how to create not just a more sustainable workplace, but one which allows their team members to thrive.  

While exhausting to navigate, the upside of such a chaotic two years for people leaders has been that we’re taking the time to take a step back and truly reevaluate why we do things, who we’re doing them for, and how things can be done better. In the past few weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to chat with four of the most thoughtful people leaders out there about how they’re navigating—and thriving in—our new workplace normal. 

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Identify root causes, rather than the symptoms

One of our favorite nuggets of wisdom came from Adriana Roche, the CPO of MURAL. For much of 2020 and 2021, people leaders have been navigating employee burnout. Adriana saw many trends—take the popularized mental health day, for example—but decided to put the work in upfront to determine the root cause of employee burnout.

Through facilitated listening exercises, Adriana and her team determined that norms around communication were creating an always-on, high stress environment where last minute requests were frequent. The team had grown, but the ways in which team members communicated had not adapted. For example, many team members were feeling inundated by Slack messages. While an effective way for smaller teams to communicate, the constant notifications in different direct messages and team channels were overwhelming at scale. Through this deeper understanding of the why, Adriana’s team was able to establish new guidelines around communication, leading to different behaviors and reduced stress. 

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Customize your story—and sell it authentically and unapologetically

Kathryn Minshew, CEO & Founder of The Muse, made an analogy about the modern workplace we can’t stop thinking about. Kathryn explained how, in a world where almost everything is customized for and tailored to the individual, the workplace is late to the game. Netflix recommends shows based on our watching behavior, search engines show us ads based on our preferences—and this is the world candidates are used to. Yet, we still expect certain perks to sound attractive to all people. Kathryn described universal “best places to work” lists as ridiculous, “it’s like saying, this is the ‘best person to marry’.” 

There’s a reason not everyone on earth wants to work at Google and Facebook who offer three meals a day and on-campus haircuts, or at investment banking companies where you can make more money than in just about any other role. We all value different things. Employers will come off as most authentic when they’re clear about what makes their workplace special, and do their diligence when it comes to hiring culture fits. In her role, Kathryn encourages companies to look at employee satisfaction and retention as part of hiring metrics. She explains how, when employers are more authentic in communicating their values and thoughtful in what they offer, employees can make more intentional and informed decisions and end up more satisfied, staying longer, and generally having a larger impact at their company. 

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Lean into learning and development

Especially with major cultural shifts like we’ve experienced with the pandemic, it’s important for people leaders to revisit learning and development frequently. Suzy Walther, CPO of Carta, reminds us to not be afraid to retrain. She describes more seasoned managers sometimes struggling to lead with vulnerability, which, in a time where the personal and professional have merged like never before, can be harmful to the people they lead. Suzy shares that at Carta, they host “manager dens,” where managers learn from one another how to navigate tough conversations and situations. This peer-to-peer learning reminds us that effective retraining and education doesn’t always have to come from us as people leaders—sometimes all we need to do is facilitate the opportunity for people to learn from those in similar positions.

If you’re noticing burnout within your organization but aren’t quite sure where to start with L&D, Marissa Morrison, VP of People at WELL Health, describes asking the question as, “If HR were a product, how would you build it? Who is your end user and what is the goal?” From there, determine who has the best or most necessary input and lean on your senior leadership to say, is this actually useful?

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Lead with vulnerability (and don’t forget self care)

People teams have had to navigate an unprecedented situation with sensitivity, care, flexibility, and creativity—and it has been exhausting. You can’t do it all yourself; asking for help and setting boundaries are crucial for people leaders as well as the teams they serve. Ashley Killick, Head of People at Modern Health, encourages people leaders to train their managers to lead with vulnerability. Especially for companies that are fully or mostly remote, this needs to be deliberate and intentional. Build time into meetings to ask people how they’re doing, how they spent their weekends, etc. Adriana says to assume trust isn’t there and you have to work on building it. 

Through our work at Cocoon, we get to chat every day with inspiring people leaders like Adriana, Kathryn, Suzy, Marissa, and Ashley. The workplace is changing and we’re excited to be a piece of the puzzle for people leaders who are working hard to provide their teams with a human-forward, empathetic work environment.

2023 leave benchmarks are here! Check out how your peers have updated their policies, plus data from three times as many employers and more detail for medical leaves.

It’s no secret that Covid-19 has disrupted nearly every industry as companies have been forced to navigate operational challenges while also addressing the evolving needs of their people. For working parents, juggling remote work on top of remote learning has been particularly challenging. 

On top of this logistical nightmare, employees in tech are grappling with mental health challenges: in 2021, 51 percent of tech professionals have been diagnosed with a mental health condition and over 55 percent of people reported burnout. 

With all the combined challenges the pandemic has introduced and exacerbated, employees have had nearly two years to consider their values and priorities. For many of us, we’ve realized that what really matters to us is not snacks or ping pong tables, but when our company steps up in the most critical moments of our lives—whether it’s having a baby, caring for an older parent, or taking time off to recover.
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Reevaluating leave as part of changing employee needs

In response to this change in what employees expect, businesses are increasingly reevaluating benefits such as leave policies that are especially relevant in these pivotal life moments. Given the highly competitive talent market, it’s not surprising that tech companies specifically are leading the charge here in expanding their policies to better support caregivers and working parents. 

To better understand just what these policies look like, we surveyed 31 venture-funded tech companies in 2020. 

In this article, we’ll walk through innovative strategies from companies like Gem and Vercel, who are paving the way when it comes to parental leave, and some of the results they’ve seen from adjusting their policies. And if you’re wondering what the baseline is for how your peers are handling leave as inspiration for rolling out your own program—we’ve got you covered there, too. 
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A peek at the data: parental leave policy benchmarks

According to our survey, at early stage tech companies, non-birthing parental leave policies range from 6 weeks to 16 weeks, with the average employer providing 9.8 weeks of leave. For birthing parents, these same companies offer anywhere from 8 to 20 weeks leave, with the average company providing 13 weeks, all paid at 100 percent. 

One example of an organization that recognized the need to better support working parents throughout the pandemic is Vercel, a San Francisco-based startup revolutionizing front-end development.  

“Having a child is one of the most formative experiences a family can go through,” says Shelby Garrison, Head of People and Culture at Vercel. “We are incentivized to make this a really amazing experience for them because it not only shapes their experience as an employee of Vercel, but shapes how invested they feel in Vercel.” 

After working with the Cocoon team to better understand what “normal” looked like (but also noting that she didn’t want to stop at that!), Shelby decided to increase Vercel’s non-birthing leave in the U.S. from 10 weeks to 16 weeks. Additionally, Shelby looked past “industry-standard” tenure requirements: now at Vercel, all U.S. employees (regardless of whether they’ve been at the company for one day or one year) are eligible for a 100 percent paid 16 week leave. For Shelby, it was important as part of their talent strategy to highlight that “If you start at Vercel and you get pregnant tomorrow, you’re eligible for leave. We wanted to do right by the individual and also, we’re a startup. So we thought, what are other levers we can pull to make coming to this company as compelling as possible?”

Top tip: Recruiting expecting parents can be a key part of your talent strategy. Removing traditional “tenure requirements” is a targeted way to do this.

While it may sound scary to go from zero to 100—Shelby built Vercel’s leave and benefits infrastructure from scratch—her forward-thinking and people-first strategy is set to pay off in the talent market in particular. After all, removing their eligibility requirement already makes Vercel a much more competitive employer with a very key group of recruits—those who want to start families in the near- to medium-term future. 

“My job as the head of people and culture is to push things as far as I possibly can to support our people,” Shelby says. “When our people are more supported, they’re more successful. And then we, as a company, succeed even further.”
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What leave looks like for growth stage tech

As tech companies grow and mature, increasing resources as well as headcount, they typically also feel the pressure to re-adjust their policies. Of the companies we surveyed, one especially generous company offers a substantial 6.5 months of leave for birthing parents, while the average employer offers 15 weeks for birthing leave and 11 weeks for non-birthing parents. 

For Gem, a San Francisco-based software company supercharging recruiting, it was important to understand what their peers were doing when analyzing their own policies. 

“Having access to Cocoon’s benchmarking data was helpful when we were first implementing our new benefits system and reviewing our policies to ensure they were competitive in the market around how much time we offer our employees,” says Lara Poncia, Gem’s Director of HR. 

Don’t worry—there’s no expectation to immediately update your policy to give half a year of leave. As Lara says, a great starting place is simply assessing the landscape to understand how your benefits stack up to companies of a similar size and in a similar industry.

So, if you’re doing this data digging at a growth stage company, our research shows that almost half of tech companies of this size offer at least 16 weeks parental leave for birthing parents, and all 11 companies we surveyed offer the time at 100% pay.

Top tips: 1. A generous leave policy doesn’t need to break the bank & 2. Design your policies for where your organization will be a year from now 

If such a generous policy sounds like a hard sell to your leadership team, the facts may (pleasantly!) surprise you. Having a generous leave policy doesn’t have to break the bank. In fact, a significant portion of your 100% paid policy can be funded by state and insurance policies. Cocoon makes it quick and easy for employees to get paid from these sources, even saving companies money. 

And if you’re hesitant that it may be too soon to implement such competitive leave policies, many of the best people leaders craft policies based on where they expect their company to be a year from now. Proactively planning for the future allows companies to attract and retain talent going into the next phase of scale. 
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How late and public stage companies are approaching leave

Out of the 10 companies we surveyed which fall into the late stage and public category, 90 percent of companies offer at least 10 weeks leave for birthing parents with the average offering at 14 weeks; for non-birthing parents, the average leave is 9.8 weeks. 

Unsurprisingly, this group tends to offer the most generous paid leave benefits—and so to compete for talent, they need to differentiate in other ways. 

If your company falls into this category and you’re wondering which levers you can pull beyond actual paid time off, you’re in great company—companies at this stage tend to get creative. Some have added manager training to ensure smooth transitions from and back to the workplace; others are focused on DEI efforts to make leave as inclusive as possible. 

Another major benefit many late and public stage companies offer? Easing employees back into work with ramp back programs, supporting them with more flexible hours as they adjust to their new normal. 

Top tip: Get creative with your offerings beyond paid leave with policies like ramp back programs, inclusive leave for non-birthing parents, manager training, and a simplified, headache-free leave process for employees.

One of the biggest trends we’ve seen is layering in flexible return to work policies. Dropbox was one of the early pioneers here when they rolled out their “transition week” concept, in which employees receive 100% pay for working at 60% capacity in their first week back. This helps employees transition back into their role after a long leave, and focus mostly on catching up and getting settled with new responsibilities like childcare and pumping time.

Competitive paid leave is more or less table stakes for these larger players, so it’s important they find new and innovative ways to support employees taking leave. 
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Looking ahead

It’s clear that people leaders are responding to the needs of their employees and recognizing the importance of employee benefits, particularly when it comes to leave, flexibility, and mental health. 

Shelby takes inspiration from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when discussing her personal response and philosophy toward employee leave and benefits. “People thrive when their most basic needs are met,” she explains. “You need physical safety, psychological safety, rest...all of these things are required to get people to perform at their highest potential.”

While our focus today has largely been on what your policy looks like when it comes to supporting people through leave, it’s important to remember that it’s not just about time and pay. 

The reality is, it doesn’t matter how generous your leave benefit is, if getting access to, and being paid during, those 16 weeks is challenging. In our prior professional lives, we saw that the leave experience can be so difficult, friends would tell us how they were literally on their laptops struggling to apply for disability insurance while being wheeled into a c-section. A people leader we admire once told us: “These key points are rare experiences—when you can fall more in love or less in love with your company.” It’s critical that we get these experiences right, and at Cocoon, we’re here to make that experience simple, instant, and deeply cared for. 

It's fascinating and baffling how complicated going on leave is today. The most common reasons for leave are deeply personal: you're starting a family, recovering from an injury, or caring for an aging parent. Historically, employers have asked employees to spend hours on the phone with insurance representatives and wade through mountains of government and insurance claims to take time off—often during some of the most sensitive moments of people’s lives. 

We knew there was a better way both for employers to show they care about their employees in these pivotal life moments, and for employees, to quickly and easily take the time off they need and deserve.

A brief history of employee leave

To understand how and why taking a leave of absence and managing it got so messy, it’s important to acknowledge how we got to where we are today. 

The concept of paid leave dates back to World War I, when the International Labor Organization adopted the Maternity Protection Convention. This 1919 convention called for 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, free medical care during and after pregnancy, job guarantees upon return to work, and periodic breaks to nurse infants. 

Since then, every developed country in the world has either followed or surpassed this international standard—except the United States. 

Progress was minimal and slow until 1993, when President Clinton passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This labor law requires covered employers to provide employees with job-protected and unpaid leave for qualifying reasons. States then began passing their own paid leave acts, leading us to 2020, when two things happened: one, President Biden expressed support for 12 weeks of paid family leave, and two, a global pandemic shifted cultural and societal paradigms around the workplace and what we—the U.S. workforce—hold most important.

We’re at a massive inflection point for leave

2020 has been a massive inflection point for both employees and HR teams. 

For employees, more than a year spent working from home has enabled many of us to realize what really matters when it comes to workplace benefits, and what we can expect from our employers. In countless conversations with workers in a myriad of industries, we believe one of the most important and widespread of these expectations is that employers step up for their employees in critical, pivotal moments. 

For HR teams, there’s been a combinatorial explosion of regulations around leave with COVID as well as new regulations at the state and federal level. The increasing number of employees opting to work remotely to be nearer to family and friends during the pandemic created a compliance nightmare for people leaders. We’ve heard over and over again from people leaders that leave was hard before COVID, but now that their teams are distributed across different states, it’s 10x harder.

The problem with employee leave

New parents, caregivers or anyone dealing with a personal or medical issue must juggle the alphabet soup of leave laws, dealing with the state and private insurance, and spending a shocking amount of time on administrative tasks instead of being able to focus on the reason they took leave. We’ve had friends tell us how they were literally on their laptops struggling to apply for disability insurance while being wheeled into a surgery. 

Baffled by experiences like this one, we started chatting with people from all walks of life; from teammates of ours and people who worked in dentist offices, construction sites, and convenience stores, to security guards, hairdressers, executive assistants, and more. 

Their experiences were eye-opening. From not being able to find a fax machine to file claims, to keeping an Excel spreadsheet to track checks and reconcile pay, we talked to hundreds of employees who had nightmare stories to tell and wondered why nobody had solved this problem yet.

In addition to horror stories from folks going on leave, we also talked to people leaders who shared with us how difficult it is to support their employees through these pivotal life moments. They’re spending time figuring out what an employee is eligible for, which compliance notices need to be sent and how to determine complex payroll calculations. This leaves little room to bring empathy into the experience and results in a completely broken system for all.

We’re building the future of leave—join us

At Cocoon, we're rolling up our sleeves and tackling this complex world of employee leave and how it’s managed. We saw how difficult it was for our own friends and teammates to take leave during critical life moments; moments they should not be spending on the phone with insurance companies or searching for a fax machine in the hospital. 

Having seen dusty, highly regulated industries get transformed in our prior lives at Square and Stripe, we strongly believe we can bring the same level of creativity and instant simplicity to the world of leave. 

We started Cocoon to make leave what it should be. What we’d want it to be for our friends, families, teammates, and ourselves. 

Come join us to push the boundaries on employee leave together.

Amber, Lauren & Mahima

Making an impact

I was at a large law firm for four years, and we were the busiest I’d ever been when my father was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer.

I was trying to keep work at my firm going while desperately hoping things would get better, traveling back and forth between SF and LA every weekend for months.

Until one Thursday night I just had to go home. I couldn’t imagine not being there, but I was worried about what it would mean to take time away while so many deals were closing.

Every single person on my team told me to drop everything; that they’d take care of it.

I was on leave for two months and was able to spend the time with my dad and family when I needed it most.

That experience forever sold me on the importance of giving people time for their personal lives; whether that was for their own health or taking care of others.

Go take care of your family.
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Designing the first family leave policy at Carta

Our focus at Carta has always been employee first. Right from the start, everyone at the company felt that it was important for parents to take time to bond with their children.

Our CEO had a young son shortly before I joined, so he was a new father when I started. Soon after, my own baby was born.

It’s such a life changing moment- especially at a startup where many of us are new parents. The last thing you want to do is fill out forms or worry about work.

There wasn’t really any question that we needed to have a generous leave policy right off the bat.
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Building benefits

When you bring on a benefit, it’s got to be something that your people will actually use. There are so many different benefits and perks out there, and you have to custom tailor it to your employees.

Part of that is thinking about benefits that will matter to your employees at the time when they’ll really need them.

It may not be intuitive, but it’s much more impactful to really be there for infrequent but life changing events rather than smaller ongoing benefits that have a low utilization rate.

When an employee has a child, parental leave is a critical benefit. When you’re covering that, you’re really doing things that add a ton of value.
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Advice for parents-to-be

My own experience for my first born was crazy — my daughter was born six weeks premature, and she was only 2.5 lbs. and my wife had some complications from the pregnancy, including pre-eclampsia. Her emergent birth — and the handling of all of the possible issues that arose from my daughter’s circumstances — meant I went out on leave a lot earlier than expected. I had very little time to concentrate on anything beyond my daughter’s and wife’s well-being.

It’s incredibly important to carve out time to spend with your kids. A lot of that is setting boundaries with work; I personally don’t take meetings on Friday afternoons, and that’s something I’ve had to work on.

It’s so easy to get caught up in work, especially with COVID and working remotely. I can look back on the past year, and I won’t miss the time I didn’t work in the morning and instead spent with the kids.

The other thing: parenting is hard. People will say it, but you never get it until you do it. You’ll never be perfect, and it really does take a village.

You have to give yourself a break; it’s hard, and exhausting, and you have to seriously think about how you’re proactively thinking about taking care of your mental health.
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Growing a startup while growing a family

In some ways, I think that working in this startup environment has actually helped me in my family life. There’s a lot of similarities around being able to take things in stride and keep calm.

I love trying new things and knowing that not everything is going to work; you have to adjust quickly and things move fast. As your kids are growing up all sorts of things are constantly different and have to be adjusted.

Not everything — especially your kids — will always cooperate the way you want! There’s always different things you can do and solutions you can find.

It’s easy to get burnt out or frazzled if you don’t have that mindset.
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Being a good manager

It can be really hard for people who don’t have kids to understand what a life-changing experience it is, and how much of a mental and physical burden it can be for parents. As a company — as a manager — you have to make sure your employees are as well supported as possible.

It’s incredibly important to make sure that when someone goes out to leave, they can truly clear their plate. But it takes time to get there- balls need to be passed, tasks have to be managed, and you definitely need to make sure a transition plan is in place.

You don’t want to do this last minute, or otherwise you’ll end up contacting the person on leave. Leave should be leave, where someone has complete peace of mind and isn’t worrying.

One of my reports was planning on taking leave, and I had a reminder early on from Cocoon. That was so helpful. Those are the kinds of things that make a difference- don’t wait until the last minute to start thinking about and planning for your leave.
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Cocoon and Carta

Early on we decided that if Carta was to be described in one word, we want that word to be helpful.

Our team is really lean and efficient- everything we take on is a little bit zero sum. Being able to rely on Cocoon takes a huge pressure off of us, and reduces bandwidth constraints. It allows us to focus more on serving our employees.

If we can spend more of our time thinking about our compensation philosophy and improving our promotion process, that’s huge for us. I’d much rather spend time doing those things than think about how we can become experts in filling out parental leave paperwork.

With Cocoon, we get to be just that much more helpful.