Getting Started
Roles and access
How roles work in Performance Blocks — what employees, managers, and org admins can see and do, how roles are assigned, and how multi-role users work.
Performance Blocks has three roles: employee, manager, and org admin. This article explains what each role can see and do, how a person ends up with a role, and what happens when one person needs to wear more than one hat.
The three roles
Employee
The employee role is the default. Anyone who works at your company has at least this role. Employees use the employee portal to:
- See observations their manager has shared with them.
- Read and reply to 1:1 conversations.
- View and update their own objectives.
- Respond to 360 feedback requests directed at them.
- Read their finalized summaries.
- Optionally use Henry to ask questions about their own performance — Agentic plan only.
Employees never see other employees' observations, summaries, or feedback unless their own manager explicitly shares it with them. The employee portal shows only the data that belongs to them.
Manager
A manager has at least one direct report. Managers can:
- Capture observations about anyone on their team.
- Share observations with the employee or keep them private.
- Open and reply to 1:1 conversations with their direct reports.
- Set manager-scoped objectives for their team and employee-scoped objectives for individuals.
- Open 360 feedback cycles for any of their direct reports.
- Write individual summaries and team summaries.
- View Henry analytics for their team — Agentic plan only.
- Submit summaries to the review queue.
Managers see everything for their direct reports, but they do not see data for people outside their reporting line unless they are also an org admin.
Org admin
Org admins are the people who configure and run Performance Blocks for the organization. They can do everything a manager can do, plus:
- Add, archive, and restore employees.
- Build the org chart and assign manager relationships.
- Define attributes for the organization.
- Open and close review cycles.
- Operate the review queue — approve, comment on, or send back summaries.
- Configure billing and the subscription plan.
- On the Agentic plan: configure SSO, HRIS sync, API keys, the knowledge base, and Henry analytics.
- Write skip-level summaries — Agentic plan only.
Org admins have read access to all observations, summaries, and conversations in the organization. With that comes responsibility — admin actions are recorded in the audit log.
How roles are assigned
There are three ways a person ends up with a role.
1. At invite time
When you invite someone in Settings → People, you select their role. The default is employee. You can also choose manager or org admin, and you can pick more than one. The person receives an email invitation; when they accept, the roles you selected are applied to their account.
2. Through HRIS sync
Plan availability: HRIS sync is available on the Agentic plan only.
If you have connected an HRIS, manager relationships and the basic org chart are kept in sync automatically. New hires appear as employees; people with direct reports are promoted to the manager role. Org admin is never assigned by HRIS — admin is always granted manually.
3. Manual change
An org admin can change anyone's role at any time in Settings → People → Edit. Changes take effect immediately. The audit log records who made the change and when.
Multi-role users
A single user can hold more than one role at the same time. The two common cases:
- A manager who is also an employee — almost everyone with direct reports. They have a manager of their own and they manage others.
- An org admin who is also a manager — typical for People Ops leaders, founders, and heads of department.
When a user has more than one role, the navigation and dashboard show every surface that their roles unlock. There is no role switcher to toggle between modes — everything appropriate to their roles is visible at once.
A few specifics worth knowing:
- A manager who is also an employee sees their own data in the employee portal area and their team's data in the manager area. The two views never bleed into each other.
- An org admin who is also a manager sees the full admin surface (people, attributes, cycles, review queue) and the manager surface for their own team.
- Henry, on the Agentic plan, knows which role you are using in context. If you ask "summarize my team," Henry uses your manager role. If you ask "what did Alex say about me last week," Henry uses your employee role.
What changes in the UI
Different roles see different starting points. The product adapts so that each role lands on the most useful surface by default.
Dashboards
- Employees land on a personal dashboard that shows their recent observations, active conversations, pending 360 requests, and current objectives.
- Managers land on a team dashboard that shows recent activity across their direct reports, pending 1:1 replies, draft summaries, and any team-level alerts.
- Org admins land on an organization dashboard that highlights the review queue, recent activity across the org, and configuration prompts (e.g. "5 employees are missing a manager").
Navigation
The left navigation shows different sections depending on role.
| Section | Employee | Manager | Org admin |
|---|---|---|---|
| My profile | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| My team | — | Yes | Yes |
| Conversations | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Objectives | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 360 feedback (mine) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 360 feedback (run cycles) | — | Yes | Yes |
| Summaries | View own | Author | Author + review |
| Review queue | — | — | Yes |
| Settings → People | — | — | Yes |
| Settings → Attributes | — | — | Yes |
| Settings → Billing | — | — | Yes |
| Settings → Integrations | — | — | Yes |
| Settings → Knowledge base (Agentic) | — | — | Yes |
Who can do what — the action matrix
This table covers the actions people most often ask about. A = Agentic plan only; everything unmarked is on both plans.
| Action | Employee | Manager | Org admin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capture an observation about themselves | — | — | — |
| Capture an observation about a direct report | — | Yes | Yes |
| Capture an observation about anyone in the org | — | — | Yes |
| Share an observation with the employee | — | Yes | Yes |
| View own observations (shared) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open a 1:1 conversation | — | Yes | Yes |
| Reply to a 1:1 conversation | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Set an org objective | — | — | Yes |
| Set a team objective | — | Yes | Yes |
| Set an employee objective | Yes (own) | Yes (reports) | Yes |
| Open a 360 cycle | — | Yes (reports) | Yes |
| Respond to a 360 request | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Write an individual summary | — | Yes (reports) | Yes |
| Write a team summary | — | Yes | Yes |
| Write a skip-level summary | — | — | Yes (A) |
| Submit a summary for approval | — | Yes | Yes |
| Approve a summary in the review queue | — | — | Yes |
| Add or archive employees | — | — | Yes |
| Edit attributes | — | — | Yes |
| Configure SSO / HRIS | — | — | Yes (A) |
| Configure the knowledge base | — | — | Yes (A) |
| Generate API keys | — | — | Yes (A) |
| View Henry analytics for own activity | Yes (A) | Yes (A) | Yes (A) |
| View Henry analytics for the team | — | Yes (A) | Yes (A) |
| View Henry analytics for the org | — | — | Yes (A) |
Authentication
All users sign in the same way. On the Team plan, sign-in is via email + password (with email verification on first use).
Plan availability: SSO is available on the Agentic plan only.
On Agentic, an org admin can configure SAML SSO in Settings → Security. Once SSO is enforced, users in the SSO domain must sign in through your identity provider; password login is disabled for them. See the security and IT guide for setup details.
Visibility and privacy
A few rules of thumb that apply across roles:
- Draft observations are private to the author. They are not visible to the employee or to admins until shared.
- Shared observations are visible to the employee, the author, the employee's manager chain, and org admins. "Manager chain" means the employee's direct manager and any manager above them in the org chart.
- Conversations are private to the two participants. Org admins can see that a conversation exists for compliance purposes but do not read its contents in the normal product surface. Specific export and audit workflows are documented in the admin guide.
- Summaries are private to the author until submitted. Submitted summaries are visible to admins; approved summaries are visible to the employee if shared.
- 360 responses are visible to the manager who opened the cycle and to org admins. Anonymous cycles strip the responder's identity from the manager view.
Where to go next
- New manager — Quick tour.
- New org admin — Admin guide.
- Setting up SSO or HRIS — Security and IT and Integrations.