HR Perspective with MEMORY NGUWI
MOST employers still build benefits packages around assumptions that have never been tested. The thinking goes that a company vehicle signals status, that a sponsored holiday rewards loyalty, and that school fees keep parents grateful. Spread these across a workforce, and you have a competitive package. The problem is that almost nobody has asked employees what they would actually pick if they were forced to choose only one.
I ran that experiment on LinkedIn. The question was simple: given a choice by your employer to pick one, which of the following benefits would you choose? The options were a housing loan, school fees assistance for children, a fully expensed company vehicle, or a company sponsored holiday. The poll attracted 665 votes and 7,871 impressions. The result was not close.
71 percent of respondents chose a housing loan. School fees came second at 22 percent. The fully expensed company vehicle, long treated as a prestige benefit, attracted only five percent. The sponsored holiday collected one percent. Once you see the numbers, the question changes. Why does housing dominate so completely, and what does that tell us about how employers should be building reward packages in 2026?
Why housing wins
The first answer is that housing is not really a benefit in the same category as a holiday. It is a wealth building asset. Decades of peer reviewed research show that home ownership is one of the most reliable routes to financial security available to ordinary households. Studies of asset accumulation have found that owning a home shifts how people experience their economic lives, providing what one researcher described as the difference between income that feeds the stomach and assets that change the head. A holiday is consumed in two weeks. A house compounds for 30 years.
The second answer is psychological. A recent review of the link between owning a home and mental health found that homeowners report better mental health outcomes than renters across multiple studies, although the effect weakens when mortgage stress is high. The mechanism is stability. Knowing where you will sleep in five years removes a category of low grade anxiety that follows renters everywhere. For employees in volatile economies, that stability is worth more than any company perk.
The third answer is performance related, and this is the part most employers miss. A meta analysis covering 256 effect sizes from studies involving more than 111,000 people found that financial scarcity has a meaningful detrimental effect on cognitive performance. People struggling with money make worse decisions, remember less, and concentrate poorly. A separate systematic review of two decades of workplace research concluded that financial stress lowers commitment, performance, and health while raising work family conflict and counterproductive behaviour. Employees worried about housing are not at full strength. Helping them buy a home is not charity. It is a productivity intervention.
The fourth answer is local. The Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa reports that only 32,8 percent of urban households in Zimbabwe own their homes, that mortgages run for 10 years at interest rates between 45 and 55 percent and that many households rely on diaspora remittances to fund housing because the formal market cannot. In that environment, an employer who fronts a housing loan is providing access to a market that the banking system has effectively closed. The vehicle and the holiday become trivial in comparison.
What this means for reward design in 2026
There is also a generational shift hiding in the data. A review of total rewards research concludes that employees increasingly view pay and benefits holistically, weighing them as one package against their actual life stage. A 28-year-old trying to start a family does not weigh a company car the same way a 55-year-old executive does. When the workforce is asked to rank benefits against each other rather than receive them as a fixed bundle, the items that build long term security pull ahead. The poll captured exactly this. School fees, which directly invest in children’s futures, came second precisely because it shares the wealth building logic of housing. Both are investments. The vehicle and the holiday are not.
It is worth pausing on the five percent who chose the company vehicle. It is a clear signal that a benefit once felt indispensable to executive life has been quietly downgraded by those receiving it. Vehicles depreciate. Houses appreciate. Once employees see their benefits through that lens, the ranking is no longer surprising. It is inevitable.
The practical implication for employers is uncomfortable. If 71 percent of your workforce would trade everything else for a housing loan, the prestige perks in your current package are largely invisible to them. They are not refusing the company car. They are politely accepting it while wishing it were a deposit on a house. A reward design that ignores this signal is wasteful. The money is being spent on benefits employees would not pick if asked.
The fix is not to scrap holidays and vehicles. It is to give employees a real choice. Flexible benefits frameworks, where employees choose their preferred mix from a fixed-value pool, allow people to direct rewards toward what their lives actually need. The poll shows what most of them would choose if given the chance. The only question left is whether employers are willing to listen.
Key takeaways
1. When forced to choose one benefit, professionals overwhelmingly select the option that builds long term wealth, not the one that signals status.
2. Housing operates as an asset and a stability anchor at the same time, which is why no other benefit comes close to it in employee preference.
3. Financial stress reduces cognitive performance and workplace effectiveness, so housing assistance is a performance intervention, not a soft perk.
4. In economies where formal mortgage finance is broken or expensive, employer housing loans fill a gap the banking system has abandoned.
5. Fixed benefit bundles waste money on items employees would not select if asked, which is why flexible benefits design outperforms one size packages.
Implications for practice
Audit your current benefits package against employee preference, not against what competitors offer. Run an internal version of this poll. If most of your spend is going to benefits ranked low by your own people, you are paying for invisibility.
Move from fixed bundles to flexible benefits. Set a total reward value, present employees with a menu, and let them allocate. The administrative cost is real. The retention value is larger. People stay where their preferences are respected.
Build a housing assistance scheme even if you cannot fund full loans. Co operative arrangements with banks, deposit assistance schemes, and salary backed guarantees all reduce the housing barrier without requiring the employer to act as a lender. The signal to employees is what matters.
Treat school fees as the second most powerful lever you have. The 22 percent who picked it are likely parents at a specific life stage, and they are telling you that investing in their children is the closest substitute for investing in a home. Both share the wealth building logic that drives the result.
Nguwi is an occupational psychologist, data scientist, speaker and managing consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm.