Building a Culture of Compassion
Mahima Chawla · CEO and Co-Founder · Cocoon, leave management software trusted by Carta, Notion, and Benchling
Summary
- Most leave policies are generous on paper and broken in practice. Employees either do not know their options or cannot figure out how to use them.
- Compassionate leave is a category most employers miss entirely. It covers bereavement, pregnancy loss, legal proceedings, and acute mental health needs that standard policy ignores.
- Small cultural practices compound. A kudos channel, a social budget, regular AMAs with leadership, and consistent benefit reminders cost almost nothing and signal everything.
- Feedback systems only work if you close the loop. Pulse surveys and exit interviews are useful only when themes are acted on and communicated back to the team.
- Compassionate culture is not in tension with business outcomes. It drives them. When people feel supported, they stay longer, perform better, and communicate more openly.
Who This Episode Is For
HR leaders, CHROs, and people operations teams rebuilding leave programs and designing cultures where employees can bring their whole selves to work.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- What the two pillars of effective leave policy are and why most organizations get at least one wrong.
- How to design a compassionate leave category that covers what standard policy misses.
- Which small cultural practices make the biggest difference and how they build on each other.
- How to build a feedback system that generates real signal, not just survey numbers.
- Why people-centric organizations consistently outperform customer-centric ones on retention.
- How to align your internal culture with the external mission your organization is trying to deliver.
Key Takeaways
The Two Pillars: Awareness and Access
Generous leave policy fails when employees cannot find it or figure out how to use it. Awareness and access are the two pillars that make leave programs actually work.
- Awareness means your policy is public, linked in onboarding docs, referenced in Slack, and revisited in all-hands. Employees should know what they have before a crisis hits.
- Access means employees can explore their options privately before talking to a manager. They should be able to plan without pressure.
- Display time and pay options side by side. Employees need both pieces of information to make real decisions.
- Reduce cognitive load: one place to track documents, deadlines, and providers. Leave should not feel like a puzzle to solve at the worst moment of someone's life.
- One coordinated platform that tracks documents, deadlines, and claims changes the experience entirely for an employee juggling HR, state disability, and private insurance simultaneously.
Build Leave Beyond Standard Categories
Once parental, medical, and caregiver leave are covered, employees start asking why other major life events do not qualify. The answer is to expand thoughtfully into compassionate leave.
- Compassionate leave is paid, job-protected time for events outside standard categories: bereavement, pregnancy loss, abortion procedures, legal proceedings, and acute mental health distress.
- Use the phrase "but are not limited to" so the policy signals flexibility without requiring HR to pre-authorize every possible scenario in advance.
- Cocoon's own policy covers four weeks of compassionate leave on a rolling twelve-month basis. It operates on top of, not instead of, parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
- Caregiver leave is the fastest-growing new leave category. A generation juggling both childcare and elder care is driving that shift.
- Expanding leave types sends a signal: we have thought about what your life actually looks like, not just the scenarios HR found easy to define.
Small Actions Compound Into Culture
Compassion does not require grand gestures. Small, consistent practices embedded in daily operations signal that the organization sees its people as whole humans, not just workers.
- Create a kudos channel in Slack where anyone can recognize a colleague. Tie it to company values. Lightweight recognition compounds when it happens consistently.
- Offer a small social budget per employee. At Cocoon it is thirty dollars, enough to organize a virtual or in-person event without approval friction.
- Remind people of their benefits in natural forums: all-hands, Slack channels, quarterly reviews. Employees forget what they have. Repetition makes policies stick.
- Hold regular AMAs with leadership where you share what is on your mind and ask directly what is frustrating or stressing people out.
- Let employees bring their interests and passions to the workplace. People who feel like owners show up differently than people who feel like resources.
Make Feedback an Operating System
If you do not measure how your culture is landing, you cannot improve it. Feedback works only when it leads to action and when those actions are communicated back to the team.
- Run pulse surveys two to three times per year with both ratings and open-ended prompts. Expect three to four qualitative comments per employee as a baseline.
- Hold quarterly AMAs or roundtables with each team. Exit interviews surface blind spots no current employee will say out loud.
- Use one-on-ones to ask directly: what is working, what is frustrating, what would help right now.
- Bring leadership and the people team together quarterly to identify themes. Communicate openly about what is being addressed and why.
- Tell your team what you are changing. Tell them what you are not changing and why. Everyone moves in the same direction when expectations are clear.
Compassionate Culture Is a Business Advantage
Compassion is not a cost center. When employees feel genuinely supported, they stay longer, perform better, and communicate more openly. The two goals are not in tension.
- People-centric organizations outperform customer-centric ones on retention and engagement. Taking care of people is how you take care of customers.
- Retention is a direct business metric. If you have invested in recruiting and onboarding someone, losing them is expensive. Compassionate culture is the lowest-cost retention tool available.
- Productivity increases when people are not managing stress in isolation. Employees who feel cared for can focus on work instead of hiding the parts of their lives that are hard.
- When managers are skilled at supporting people through difficult moments, communication opens up and problems get resolved faster.
- Think team by team, not company-wide. What an engineering team needs versus a sales team is rarely the same.
About Mahima Chawla
- CEO and Co-Founder of Cocoon, leave management software trusted by Carta, Notion, and Benchling.
- Leads the conversation around how employers can build compassionate leave cultures that support employees through life's biggest moments.
- Cocoon published its own leave policy publicly as a template, including paid compassionate leave for bereavement, pregnancy loss, legal proceedings, and mental health crises.
- Believes people-centric organizations consistently outperform customer-centric ones because supported employees deliver better work and stay longer.
Connect with Mahima on LinkedIn →
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the two pillars of effective leave policy?
The two pillars are awareness and access. Awareness means employees know their options before a crisis hits. Access means they can use those options without navigating a confusing process. Most organizations invest in generous policies but fail to make them visible or easy to use. When both pillars are in place, employees can plan calmly and take leave without added cognitive burden during an already stressful moment.
What is compassionate leave and what does it cover?
Compassionate leave is paid, job-protected time for events that fall outside standard parental, medical, or caregiver categories. It covers bereavement, pregnancy loss, abortion procedures, travel for out-of-state medical care, legal proceedings, and acute mental health distress. Using the phrase "but are not limited to" in the policy signals flexibility without requiring HR to define every qualifying scenario in advance. It acknowledges that employees know what their lives actually require.
What small practices build a compassionate workplace culture?
Consistent small actions compound over time. A kudos channel, a social budget per employee, and benefit reminders in all-hands all signal that the organization sees employees as whole people. None of these require large budgets. They require consistent attention and a belief that culture is built in daily interactions, not at annual retreats or through a revised employee handbook.
How do you build a feedback system that produces real signal?
Run pulse surveys two to three times per year with both ratings and open-ended prompts. Hold quarterly AMAs and honest one-on-ones. Run exit interviews. Then bring leadership together to identify themes and decide what to address. The critical step is closing the loop: tell your team what is changing and what is not. Feedback that disappears destroys trust faster than the original problem did.
How does compassionate culture connect to business performance?
They reinforce each other. Employees who feel supported stay longer, perform better, and communicate more openly. Retention is a direct business metric. Productivity increases when employees are not managing stress in isolation. People-centric organizations outperform customer-centric ones on engagement and retention because they recognize that the people delivering the mission need to be cared for. The cost of ignoring employee wellbeing is measurable and compounds over time.
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