The Cocoon blog

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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