Meet Henry

Henry is the AI assistant inside Performance Blocks. It is not a generic chatbot bolted onto the side of the product. It is a purpose-built helper that knows about your team, your observations, your past 1:1s, and the documents your admin has uploaded — and it uses that context to help you draft, summarize, and prepare for the work managers actually do.

This article explains what Henry is, what it can and cannot do, where it shows up, what it knows about your organization, how your data is handled, and when it is worth pulling Henry in versus doing the work yourself.

Plan availability: Henry Agent is available on the Agentic plan. Team plan customers can upgrade in Settings → Billing.

What Henry is

Henry is an AI agent embedded across the surfaces where managers already work — the web app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, your browser, and your inbox. It is designed for one specific job: helping you do performance management better, faster, and more consistently.

That focus matters. A general-purpose assistant has to guess what you mean when you say "draft a summary." Henry knows that a summary in this product has a specific shape — strengths, growth areas, recent observations, ratings against competencies, recommended development actions. It knows what an observation looks like, what a 1:1 agenda usually contains, and what a 360-feedback prompt should ask. It uses that domain knowledge to ask better questions and produce better drafts.

Henry is built around three capabilities:

• Drafting: turning a few sentences of context into a structured observation, conversation starter, summary, or feedback response.
• Summarizing: taking a pile of inputs (observations, 360 responses, objectives) and producing a coherent overview.
• Retrieval: pulling the right information out of your knowledge base — leveling guides, competency models, manager handbooks — and grounding its answers in those documents.

What Henry is not is a system of record. The notes, observations, summaries, and feedback inside Performance Blocks are your source of truth. Henry sits on top of that data and helps you work with it.

What Henry can do

Henry is most useful for the writing-heavy parts of performance management — the moments where you have something in your head and need to get it onto the page in a structured form.

Specific things Henry does well:

• Draft an observation from a few bullet points or a rough paragraph. You describe what happened; Henry returns a structured note with strengths, areas for growth, attribute tags, and a recommended action.
• Generate conversation starters for an upcoming 1:1, drawing from recent observations, the previous meeting's notes, and any open follow-ups.
• Summarize a quarter or a cycle by pulling together every observation written about a person, any 360 responses, and the status of their objectives.
• Aggregate themes across a team to surface what is working broadly, where multiple reports are stuck on the same problem, and where calibration might be drifting.
• Walk you through a structured task — submitting a 360 response, adding a new employee, setting up a summary — using one of the guided flows.
• Answer questions about your own data: "What did I write about Priya last quarter?" "Which of my reports has not had an observation in 60 days?" "Show me everyone tagged with 'cross-team collaboration'."
• Answer questions about your knowledge base: "What does our leveling guide say about the difference between Senior and Staff?" "What is the policy on mid-cycle promotions?"

The throughline is that Henry takes the friction out of the writing and the lookups, but you stay in the driver's seat. It drafts; you review and decide.

What Henry cannot do

Henry is deliberately conservative about side effects. It can draft and propose, but it does not commit changes to your workspace without you explicitly confirming.

Specifically, Henry will not:

• Save an observation, summary, or feedback response on your behalf without confirmation. Every flow ends with a confirmation step where you review the draft and decide whether to save, edit, or discard.
• Send a notification, email, or Slack message to another user without you triggering it. If a flow would notify someone, you see the recipient list before the action runs.
• Change permissions, roles, or organizational structure. Henry can help you draft an invite, but it cannot grant access. Admin-only operations stay admin-only and require explicit clicks in the admin surfaces.
• Make decisions about ratings, promotions, or compensation. Henry can summarize what you have written about a person, but it does not generate a rating or a recommendation as if it were a system of record.
• See data outside your organization. Henry only ever has access to the workspace you are in, scoped to your role within that workspace. A manager's Henry sees that manager's reports; an admin's Henry can see broader org data because admins already have that access.

If you ask Henry to do something it cannot do, it will tell you directly and, where useful, point you at the surface that can.

Where Henry shows up

Henry is exposed through five separate surfaces. Each one is a feature your admin can toggle on or off independently, so your organization may have some active and others not.

Surface	Feature toggle	What it is
Web app panel	henryAgentApp	Right-side panel inside Performance Blocks. The primary surface and the only one that hosts guided flows.
Slack	henryAgentSlack	Direct messages and slash commands inside your Slack workspace.
Microsoft Teams	henryAgentTeams	Chat with Henry inside Teams.
Chrome extension	henryAgentChrome	A browser extension that lets you capture context from any web page (a Linear ticket, a Notion doc, a PR) into Henry.
Email	henryAgentEmail	Forward emails to a Henry address to capture them as context for an observation or summary.

All five surfaces require the master henryAgentEnabled toggle. If your org admin has Henry off entirely, none of the surfaces are available regardless of plan.

The web panel is the primary surface. It is where guided flows run, where chat history persists, and where Henry has the richest UI. The other surfaces are secondary — they exist to capture context where it lives (your inbox, your browser, your team chat) and to let you ask quick questions without switching tabs.

For details on each surface, see the surface-specific guides:

• Using the Henry panel
• Slack integration
• Microsoft Teams integration
• Chrome extension
• Email capture

What Henry knows about your organization

Henry's usefulness depends on context. The more it knows about your team and your processes, the better its drafts. Here is the full list of what it has access to.

Your people

Henry sees the employees you have access to in Performance Blocks — your direct reports if you are a manager, your full org if you are an admin. For each person, it can read names, roles, manager relationships, hire dates, and any custom fields your admin has configured.

Your observations

Every observation you have written, plus observations written about your reports by other managers (where you have access to view them), is available to Henry. This is the most important source of context for drafts and summaries — it is the raw material Henry synthesizes from.

Conversations and 1:1 history

Henry can read past 1:1 notes, agendas, and follow-ups for the people you manage. When you ask it to prep for an upcoming meeting, it pulls from this history.

360 feedback

If you have requested or received 360 feedback for someone, those responses are part of the context Henry can draw on for summaries.

Objectives

Active objectives, their current status, and recent updates are visible to Henry. This lets summaries reflect what someone has actually been working toward, not just what they did.

The knowledge base

Documents your admin has uploaded to the knowledge base — leveling guides, competency models, manager handbooks, process docs — are chunked, embedded, and searchable. When Henry's answer benefits from one of these documents, it cites the source filename in the response. See Knowledge base and retrieval for the full picture.

What Henry does not see

Henry does not see content from outside Performance Blocks unless you explicitly bring it in (by forwarding an email, sharing a page through the Chrome extension, or pasting it into chat). It does not have access to your calendar, your inbox, your code repositories, or your HRIS unless an integration has been set up by your admin and the data is flowing into Performance Blocks.

Privacy and data handling

A few things to know about how your data is treated.

• Your data is not used to train AI models. Conversations with Henry, the documents in your knowledge base, and the observations and summaries in your workspace are not sent to model providers as training data.
• Conversations are stored in your workspace. Henry chat sessions persist so you can return to them later. They are scoped to your account and your organization.
• Data scoping is role-aware. Henry only ever sees what you would see if you logged in and clicked through the product. A manager's Henry cannot see another manager's private observations; an admin's Henry can see what an admin can already see.
• Knowledge base documents are organization-scoped. Documents uploaded by one organization are never available to another. Within an organization, the admin controls which documents are indexed.
• Surfaces inherit the same scoping. Whether you ask Henry a question in the web panel, in Slack, or by forwarding an email, the answer is gated by the same permissions.

For the full data handling policy, see Security and IT.

When to use Henry, and when not to

Henry is a tool, not a replacement for your judgment. Some heuristics for when it earns its keep.

Use Henry when:

• You have something in your head and need to get it down quickly. A fresh observation about a meeting that just ended is the canonical case.
• You are about to write something repetitive — a summary, a 1:1 agenda, a 360 response — and want a starting draft to react to instead of a blank page.
• You need to find something across a lot of notes. "What have I written about Marcus and design reviews?" is faster to ask than to search.
• You are not sure what your own leveling guide or process doc says about a situation. Henry can pull the relevant snippet and cite it.

Skip Henry when:

• The decision is the hard part, not the writing. Henry can draft a paragraph about a difficult performance issue, but it cannot decide whether to put someone on a PIP. That is your call.
• The information is not in the system. Henry cannot know what was said in a meeting unless you tell it. If you have not captured the context, drafting from nothing produces generic output.
• You are writing something deeply personal. A heartfelt thank-you note or a difficult termination conversation should come from you, in your voice. Henry's drafts are a reasonable scaffold but the final words should be yours.

A useful frame: Henry is great at the parts of performance management that are structured but tedious. It is less useful for the parts that are unstructured but consequential.

Getting started

If your organization has Henry enabled, the easiest way to start is to open the panel in the web app and ask it a question about a person you manage. Try one of these:

• "What is the most recent observation I wrote about [name]?"
• "Help me prep for my 1:1 with [name] tomorrow."
• "Draft an observation: [name] led the design review today and asked good questions about the rollback plan."

The first time you use Henry, do not start with the highest-stakes draft of your year. Start with something small and iterate. You will quickly get a feel for how to ask, what context to provide, and where the assistant is strong.

From there, see Using the Henry panel for the full set of features inside the primary surface, or Guided flows to learn about the structured wizards that handle multi-step tasks.