What is a personal leave in Cocoon?
Cocoon uses personal leave to capture and track employer-authorized leaves that do not fall into other Cocoon leave types. Employers might authorize such time for a variety of reasons. These leaves can be covered by an official, documented company policy or can be one-off approved absences not covered by an official policy.
Example A: Employers might have a bereavement, jury duty or safe leave policy, but currently Cocoon does not offer bereavement, jury duty or safe leave as a type of leave. Employers should guide employees to plan a personal leave as a broad classification that can include these reasons and allow Admins to track these leaves along all others in Cocoon.
Example B: Employers might have a formal “personal” or “compassionate” leave policy. This means they can use Cocoon’s personal leave experience to review leave requests and determine whether the request complies with their official policy. The employer fully controls the decision to approve or deny the requested leave time.
Example C: Employers don’t have a formal personal leave policy, but still want to review and track ad-hoc absence requests all in one place. Cocoon’s personal leave experience streamlines this process. Cocoon’s classification of an absence as “personal leave” does not mean the employer has to have a formal personal leave policy in place.
Turning on support for personal leave in Cocoon
The option to plan a personal leave in Cocoon will not appear for employees until a Cocoon Workspace Admin turns this leave type on for their company.
To turn on personal leaves for your company:
Go to your Settings Page and choose Leave type configuration from the menu on the left
Toggle Personal Leave to on
Why should I review employee’s eligibility for other entitlements?
Given Cocoon’s personal leave is intended to capture leave or absences that do not fall within an existing Cocoon leave type, before taking personal leave, employees typically must first use all applicable leave as provided by any laws and/or company policies. It's important for Admins to review the underlining reason for Cocoon personal leave, and to verify whether the employee should use another Cocoon leave type (e.g. parental, medical, caregiver or military family leave). This will ensure employees use those existing entitlements as required by federal and state law, as applicable.
You can do this by:
First, reviewing the employee’s reason for Cocoon personal leave
Second, checking the employee’s eligibility and the remaining leave balances that apply to that leave reason. Sometimes the reason for personal leave will overlap with an entitlement, but the employee may not be eligible for it OR may have exhausted all available leave time.
Example
An employee may request personal leave to care for their spouse. After knowing the reason, the Admin can review whether the employee is eligible for FMLA and has time remaining, and if so, propose that the employee request a Caregiver leave and deny the personal leave request.
Learn how to review entitlements in Cocoon prior to approving a personal leave
Product experience
See here to go through an interactive demo of the Admin and employee experiences.