The Cocoon blog

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.

Becoming a parent while working

“I became a manager before becoming a mom. My first encounter with parental leave was when I had a report who was about to give birth to her first child, and preparing for leave. I had no clue how complicated it was to plan for both leave and return to work. It was much more stressful than either of us expected, and that was at Google which had one of the best parental leave programs in the world at the time. Later, I became a parent myself and experienced this first-hand.

When you’re about to become a parent, there are so many administrative hurdles to navigate. There are insurance forms, federal rules, and state programs you can barely understand. Few parents anticipate how difficult it is to find affordable, high quality child care. The stakes are high for both you and your baby. If you get it wrong there can be serious financial and health consequences. It’s an intense cognitive load to carry while you’re already going through the huge life change of becoming a parent.

Over time, I began to appreciate how great parental leave benefits are critical to the quality of time new parents get to spend with their children. Leave goes by quickly, and people want time and space to fully focus on their growing families.
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Supporting working parents is good for business

At Primer, we’re competing for knowledge workers. We’re building cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) technology that can read vast quantities of text based data in real time and make it easy to understand. This technology helps our users save time and be more confident making decisions about matters of critical importance — whether they are researching infectious diseases or protecting national security.

When a company is in hyper growth and building industrial-grade technology, you’re not hiring someone for one year; you’re hoping they stay with you for the long haul. Our people give a lot to Primer, so we want to support them in their biggest life moments as they grow with us. The less time they need to spend worrying about health, finances, or submitting paperwork on time, the more capacity they have for creativity.

Many people will take advantage of parental leaves at some point — whether it’s this year or five years from now. Having employees who feel welcome and know the company is there for them is an investment that pays mutual dividends.

When you think of it in those terms, parental leave is not expensive — it’s essential.
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Great leave management maximizes HR capacity, too

When I joined Primer in January of 2020, it was one of my priorities to set up a leave program that would take care of our people. Then, when COVID-19 hit, we became a more geographically distributed company than before. That meant we now had to consider the possibility — and risk — of our people needing to go on leave in every state, and in some cases, other countries.

I knew it would be a huge challenge for my tiny HR team to keep up with all the compliance and pay calculations in every state. There was a real risk that a miss somewhere would have not only financial but also legal ramifications for the business at large. We needed to bring in experts who also had empathy reflective of our culture.

As we looked at what was out there, we quickly realized the traditional leave admin processes were bureaucratic and insurance-feeling from an employee perspective.

Cocoon stood out immediately.

Cocoon offers such a novel leave management experience. Not only does it make planning and designing leave easy, their concierge team provides guidance to help employees prepare for leave and return-to-work. We simply didn’t see anything else like that on the market.

Knowing leave is fully taken care of by experts allows me to keep my HR team engaged. Now that Cocoon handles leave compliance, payroll calculations, and claim-filing, our HR team has the room to do what we’re uniquely qualified to do: foster creativity, innovation, and deeper partnership with the business.
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Advice to other People teams

One of the biggest impacts a People team can have is to remove stress in meaningful ways. The best is when you’re able to surprise and delight people.

Startups may not always have as many resources, but reducing stress and delighting people doesn’t always have to be expensive. For example, during COVID Primer has been experimenting with a Mental Health Day program. We noticed that after switching to work from home, many employees no longer had natural boundaries between work time and life time. We started seeing early signs of burnout.

We decided to test whole-company ‘Mental Health Days’ to let out some pressure in the system, and it’s been such a hit! Yes, we lose a workday now and then, but on the days we’re all working, our employees have more joie de vivre because they’re taking time to disconnect. A lot of new hires have told us they joined specifically because this benefit shows how we care about our employees.

People draw most of their inspiration at work from their lives outside of work. The more a company can be aware of that and foster both, the more we can show up as our most productive, creative selves. Partnerships with companies like Cocoon and programs like Mental Health Days demonstrate that we value our people as humans, and want them to have fulfilling lives outside of the company.
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Values

Both Primer and Cocoon turn something complicated into an experience that is beautiful and simple. Our companies exist to help people save time and feel confident in critical moments. We want a world where people can save their brain power for the most important things, not tedious, high volume tasks that are easy to mess up.

At Primer we have a company value called “Always Human.” It’s about being our most human and compassionate all of the time.

We’re excited to partner with Cocoon to make work as human as we can.”

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