When your leave system doesn’t support you—or your employees—it’s okay to look elsewhere. Angi did. And it changed everything about how they tracked, trusted, and educated about the leave process.
Managing leave in an overly manual and unsupportive vendor’s system left Angi’s team to:
After a fast implementation, Cocoon now automates leave compliance and payroll while providing a stronger educational base for leave takers and managers. The HR team is freed up to provide more personalized leave support and work on other strategic initiatives.
Self-serve leave experiences for employee clarity
Clear guidance helps employees take initiative, understand their responsibilities, and navigate leave, making Angi’s piece in the process clearer.
Greater visibility and confidence for managers and HR partners
Real-time insights into leave timelines, approvals, and return dates gives managers and People teams confidence to plan, approve schedules, and support teams consistently.
Automated compliance and payroll clarity across 47 states
Automated compliance eliminated separate tracking systems and manual payroll calculations, making pay breakdowns easy to explain and trust.
Time and budget redirected to more strategic work
Spending less time on manual work, Angi didn’t need to backfill a LOA team role and shifted it to a more urgent Benefits team hire to save money and strengthen the HR team.
See how Cocoon can help you automate leave management, so you can focus on your people.
Overseeing the Benefits, Leave of Absence (LOA), and Operations teams at Angi, Lauren Wedow isn’t joking that she keeps the lights on. In turn, her teams support roughly 1200 employees across 47 states. Joining Angi in May of 2024 as the company was navigating a spin off from its parent company, Lauren and her team needed to stand up a totally new benefits plan, and get more consistency around employee education and internal processes.
As Lauren's data-driven and iterative team looked around, they saw their leave management tool was ripe for improvement. It had little to no automation, only worked for certain pieces of the leave process, and left them spinning up leave education resources, and manually calculating state leave compliance and disability pay.
Before Cocoon, Lauren’s two-person LOA team managed leave in-house using AbsenceSoft:
Working in their tool felt more like using an upgraded spreadsheet. It didn’t automate anything, it didn’t educate leave takers, and all the rules and keeping it updated was something we had to manually do ourselves. The guardrails weren’t really there, so the output and the employee experience varied with each leave.”
With employees across 47 different states, and a leave utilization rate hovering around 25%, the Angi team was hampered by the lack of any kind of state-by-state solution and education. “We had what we monitored in their tool, then a whole separate tracking system outside of it depending on the state, which caused a lot of inconsistencies and frustrations.”
The cherry on top was the general lack of technical and customer support they received. “At one point they launched a reporting upgrade, and it was a 12-week wait before we even got a team assigned to implement it. Anything we asked about they just said, ‘oh, we can’t do that’ instead of trying to bring a creative solution.” This became clear in a lackluster contract renewal meeting that cemented Lauren’s decision to not renew. But that meant she needed a back up plan, and fast.
“It started to feel like we didn’t matter. The lack of support, the inability to iterate, the hesitation to find solutions. It was clear that this wasn’t a partnership.”
Angi’s search for a new leave management system was brief and simple, because Cocoon was already the top solution on their radar. “My teammate was getting their emails, and they even invited us to a dinner event in Denver right when our contract was ending.”
Their criteria for a new tool were clear:
A lot of vendors say, ‘well this is the way we've always done it. It has to take six to eight months, because that’s how it is,’ and Cocoon is changing that narrative, that they can do it in 2 months. And between all the reassurance and demos, and holding our hands through it, that really showed me that it could happen.”
Once Angi chose Cocoon, the next two months flew by to get it implemented just in time as the contract with their former provider ended, so no leave takers would be caught in the middle.
“Admittedly, I was the panicked one,” Lauren laughs. “I was used to things taking several months and completing intense checklists to hand off to a provider. Once we sent them the census data file, I kept asking what I needed to do, and the Cocoon team just kept saying, ‘we’ve got it!’”
While Cocoon was busy with implementation, Lauren and her team were freed up to update internal comms and education around leave—but now just focusing on Angi’s policies and guidance. “We took certain resources from multiple pages to half of that, and focused on Angi’s messaging and unique policies or stance, rather than worrying about what the entire FMLA or one particular state says. It saved so much time and effort.”
Though the solution was live on day one, Lauren and her team still had to notify the team and get everyone on board to the change. But once they realized what had changed, they saw great results.
As gray as the leave world is, Cocoon makes things a lot more black and white that we can provide to employees.”
“We’re seeing employees taking more initiative to start the process on their own, with a clear and accurate list of to-dos. Not only do they see what they need to do, but now they also understand why because Cocoon’s education is so clear. We can focus the conversation on Angi’s support, instead of a tense discussion about state policies we don’t control. Beyond that, my team now doesn’t have to spend time constantly updating our resources. We can focus on Angi’s specific role in the process and how best to support them.”
Managers and HR business partners are seemingly the most excited, as now they have the right insights into each leave, and the confidence that they’re doing the right thing—whether it’s reviewing a leave schedule or knowing when a leave taker will return. They can then use that to plan accordingly and support leave takers and the teams they’re on.
The pay breakdown always used to take so much work to figure out and were the main source of questions. Being able to show them in one click when they’ll get paid, and by whom, and know that it’s automated and correct is huge for everybody, from employees to the Payroll team.”
There are also no separate state-by-state compliance systems they have to manually keep track of on the side. “I can help any employee without needing to know all the ins and outs of each state. Cocoon will automatically update as the laws inevitably change.”
Before implementing Cocoon, the team was trying to backfill a role on the LOA team. Once they realized how Cocoon worked for them, they shifted that into a new role that was more urgent for their benefits management. “We filled a role that was more strategic for us, and saved money in the process.”
Lauren is candid about what she’d tell other HR leaders in a similar spot, with overly-manual processes or a provider that isn’t delivering:
“Explore your options. Don’t accept ‘this is how it’s always been done’ as an answer. One of the most valuable resources a provider can offer is support, and if you’re not getting that, that’s not okay. You can put as many processes in place as you want to make the best of a faulty system—but they’re just band-aids.”
For Angi, switching to Cocoon wasn’t just about making an improvement—it was about implementing a true solution, built for them. Customers like Collegewise, Baggu, and now Angi have made the shift. Explore how Cocoon can help you automate leave management, so you can focus on your people.
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