What is Military Family Leave?
There are two broad types of Military Family Leave as described below.
Note: These definitions may vary depending on leaves taken under FMLA versus a specific state program. Depending on the state existing paid family leaves may include assistance for those caregiving for a covered service member, or a handling a qualifying exigency.
1. Military Caregiver Leave
You need to take care of a covered service member with a serious injury or illness. Your relationship to the injured service member may determine your eligibility to take this leave.
2. Qualifying Exigency Leave
You need to take time to deal with urgent issues due to a family member’s active military duty or their impending call to serve. There may be limits to what constitutes qualifying military duty, reasons for leave, and who are qualifying family members.
Note: the FMLA lists nine categories of qualifying exigencies
Turning on support for military family leaves in Cocoon
The option to plan a Military Family leave in Cocoon will not appear for employees until a Cocoon Admin turns this leave type on for their company. It is turned off by default.
To turn on Military Family leaves for your company:
Go to your Settings Page and choose Leave type configuration from the menu on the left
Toggle Military Family Leave to on
How does Cocoon support Military Family leave?
Cocoon’s Military Family leave is in beta, meaning it has more basic support than Cocoon's other leave types. This feature currently offers:
Support for employees to design either a “Qualifying Exigency Leave” or “Military Caregiver Leave”
Tracking of FMLA and certain state family and medical leave entitlement usage. This means you can use Cocoon to track all FMLA-qualifying leaves
Cocoon now supports all FMLA leave types: parental, medical, caregiver (note: this excludes partial day intermittent leaves)
Functionality NOT supported in the beta release of Military Family leave
Support of company military family leave policies (paid or unpaid)
Claims assistance for employees
Pay calculations
Support for state laws providing leave for rest & recuperation when family members are home from an active military deployment
Employer responsibilities when an employee takes Military Family leave
The following is a list of potential responsibilities you as the employer may retain (outside of Cocoon) if an employee takes Military Family leave:
Administer any company paid or unpaid military family leave policies
If you have a paid military family leave policy: calculate employees' leave pay
If you have employees in CA, MA, WA, NY, or CO: inform the employee they can apply to receive benefits from the applicable state program (e.g. CA PFL)