"opportunities to use skills and abilities" and "the work itself." Note that relation- ships with supervisors, recognition, and communication were all rated highly. Not shown in Exhibit 4.16 are two other important findings. First, a sample of HR professionals were asked to predict the importance that employees attached to the rewards, and the HR professionals' predictions did not correspond all that closely to the actual employee ratings. A second finding was that there were some differences in reward importance as a function of employee age, tenure, gender, and industry; these differences, however, were relatively small.39 Additional information regarding the rewards associated with jobs can be found in O*NET. Every job in O*NET has accompanying salary information. There is also a set of work values associated with each job, evaluating the extent to which a job provides intrinsic rewards like achievement, independence, recogni- tion, relationships, support, and working conditions. As with other O*NET infor- mation, these data are collected at the occupational level rather than the job level, so they will need to be supplemented with information from the organization as well. Organizational Practices. A less direct way to assess the importance of rewards to employees is to examine the actual rewards that other organizations provide their employees. The assumption here is that these organizations are attuned to their employees' preferences and try to provide rewards that are consistent with them. Since pay and benefits loom large in most employees' reward preferences, it is particularly important to become knowledgeable of other organizations' pay and benefit practices to assist in the development of the EVP. The best single source of pay and benefit information comes from the National Compensation Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) within the Department of Labor. The pay part of the survey reports average pay for employees, broken out by occupation, private-public sector, organization size, and geographic area. The benefits part of the survey presents detailed data about the percentage of employees who have access to a benefit or are provided an average level of benefits. Data on the following benefits are provided: retirement, health care coverage (medical, dental, and vision) and required employee contributions, short- and long-term disability, paid holidays, paid vacation, child care, flexible workplace, wellness programs, and several others. The data are broken out by occur pation, industry, and geographic area. Another important source of information about benefits is the SHRM Annual Benefits Survey. It provides very detailed information about specific benefits pro- vided in each of the following areas: family friendliness, housing and relocation, health care and wellness, personal services, finances, business travel, leave, and other benefits. The data are broken out by organization size