Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report put global employee engagement at 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020. Gallup estimates the shortfall cost the world economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity, and each percentage point of engagement represents roughly 21 million workers.
Against that backdrop, a company whose employees rate it well on happiness, benefits, and balance stands out. On Sept. 29, Risepoint, a global education technology company, announced that it had received three new Comparably Best Places to Work awards: Happiest Employees, Best Perks & Benefits, and Best Work-Life Balance. The fall round brings the company’s 2026 Comparably total to seven.
The figures behind the awards are worth walking through, because they explain why the recognition carries weight.
The data set
Comparably, owned by ZoomInfo, doesn’t take applications or convene judges. It awards companies based on anonymous ratings from their current employees. For this cycle, those ratings were collected over 12 months, between Aug. 24, 2025, and Aug. 24, 2026.
Scale matters here. The final data set for the cycle included 20 million ratings across 70,000 companies in the United States and Canada. Responses were compared with companies of similar size, so a firm with more than 1,400 employees, like Risepoint, was measured against peers of comparable scale rather than against a 40-person startup or a multinational with hundreds of thousands of staff.
Comparably tracks nearly 20 workplace categories in total. The three Risepoint won this fall each draw on a specific set of inputs.
Happiest Employees is evaluated on employee feedback about the workplace environment, compensation and benefits, excitement about work and colleagues, connection to company goals, and company pride. That’s five distinct inputs, which makes it one of the more demanding categories to win. A company can pay well and still lose on pride. It can inspire pride and still lose on environment.
Best Perks & Benefits considers feedback about benefits, paid time off, and other offerings.
Best Work-Life Balance looks at hours worked, breaks, time off, and burnout.
Where the categories overlap with Gallup’s concerns
Gallup’s 2026 report tracks engagement, wellbeing, and daily stress, and it found stress and other negative emotions still elevated worldwide. Burnout, time off, and hours are the same pressure points Comparably’s work-life category measures. Connection to goals and excitement about the work line up closely with what Gallup calls engagement.
The two measurements aren’t interchangeable. Gallup surveys workers across more than 140 countries and territories through its World Poll, while Comparably collects ratings from employees of specific companies. Read side by side, though, they point at the same questions: whether people feel tied to the purpose of their work, and whether the job leaves them enough room to recover.
Risepoint by the numbers
The company’s own figures give the awards context.
Risepoint has more than 1,400 employees, working remotely across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. It supports online programs at more than 100 not-for-profit universities and colleges across five countries and has supported more than 825,000 students through those partnerships.
More than 90% of students in Risepoint-supported programs are working adults. The average tuition of Risepoint-supported programs is about $19,800. In a 2025 independent study by Ipsos, a majority of graduates finished without debt, and tuition typically paid for itself within roughly 18 months through higher earnings. Graduates reported an average salary increase of 19% within one year of completing their programs and 34% within three years.
On the Comparably side, the company’s 2026 tally now stands at seven awards:
- Best Career Growth (June)
- Best Leadership Teams (June)
- Best Sales Teams (June)
- Best Product & Design Teams (June)
- Happiest Employees (September)
- Best Perks & Benefits (September)
- Best Work-Life Balance (September)
A repeat pattern
Three of those categories have appeared in the Risepoint record before. In 2024, the company was named to Comparably’s lists for Happiest Employees, Best Company Perks & Benefits, and Best Company Work-Life Balance. That year it also landed on the Best Leadership Teams list, Fernando Bleichmar received a Best CEO award that put him in the top 5% of chief executives at large companies, and the company earned Best Company Culture, where it ranked in the top 10% of large companies.
Because each cycle uses a fresh 12-month window of ratings, a repeat win is a second independent reading, taken two years apart, from a workforce that has changed in the meantime.
“These awards are especially meaningful because that feedback comes directly from our employees and reflects the experience we are working together to create every day,” Bleichmar, Risepoint CEO, said in the announcement.
Timing and the Keypath deal
The rating window has one more detail worth noting. It closed on Aug. 24, 2026, six days after Risepoint announced its acquisition of Keypath Education’s North American operations. That deal added more than 20 university partnerships and a clinical placement network with relationships across nearly 15,000 healthcare sites and more than 28,000 preceptors.
The September awards, in other words, measure the Risepoint workforce as it stood before that expansion. The next cycle will measure a larger organization.
What the company says it’s doing
The Risepoint announcement pointed to three areas of investment: flexibility in how and where employees work, benefits and resources that support people at different life and career stages, and opportunities for employees to build relationships and contribute to company culture.
All three are harder to deliver in a remote-first organization. With employees spread from North America to the United Kingdom and Australia, the workday for one team can begin as another’s ends, and time off only helps if colleagues respect it. The categories Risepoint won this fall are the ones where those strains would show up first in the ratings.
Bleichmar described the aim in plain terms. “We want our employees to be able to do impactful work while having the flexibility and support they need in their lives outside of work,” he said.
In a year when Gallup recorded the second straight annual decline in global engagement, 12 months of anonymous ratings from Risepoint employees placed the company among Comparably’s winners in the categories that track that problem most closely.
