As the broader conceptions of health and wellness have evolved, so too have the typologies of interventions offered by organizations. An early typology offered by several researchers proposed three levels of health programs:

Level I: Awareness programs, including newsletters, health fairs, screening sessions, education classes, and other activities that raise individual awareness of the consequences of unhealthy behaviors

Level II: Specific programs for lifestyle modification, including fitness programs, back exercises, and the like, characterized by active employee involvement in adopting health-promoting behaviors

Level III: Programs that create environments in which individuals can sustain healthy lifestyles over the long term, including the provision of fitness centers at the workplace, making healthy food available, and removing unhealthy food from the workplace.

From these three levels, fourth-generation programs evolved, variously referred to as total health programs, comprehensive health promotion programs, or health and productivity management programs. Johnson & Johnson’s Live for Life program represents one of the earliest comprehensive wellness programs. Three key components of the J&J program are health risk assessment, creative educational units, and physical fitness training. Health risk assessments may include analyzes of stress management, fitness, nutrition, safety, and ergonomics, and the assessments are used to identify the individual’s strengths and weaknesses. In the educational units, a wide variety of media is used to deliver education on such topics as weight management, smoking cessation, women’s health issues, and blood pressure management, among other health-related subjects. In J&J’s physical fitness training, programs are tailored specifically to individual needs. Evaluations of the Live for Life program have indicated positive effects on exercise, health behaviors, and employee work attitudes.

Kimberly-Clark Corporation’s Health Management program is also a benchmark comprehensive program, initiated in 1977. The program reflects the company’s culture and its belief that well-informed, healthy employees are happier, safer, more productive, and have better attendance records, and that these factors produce lower health care costs for the organization. Integrated, multidisciplinary teams provide health screening, primary care, exercise programs, nursing care, and employee assistance programs at Kimberly-Clark’s various locations. Fitness facilities include indoor running tracks, Olympic-size pools, nature trails, weights, and aerobic equipment. Preventive and educational services are provided, which include family wellness, nutrition education, CPR training, and sport-specific workshops, among other programs.

Health and productivity management programs (HPM) have three basic goals: (1) to provide integrative services that promote employee health or assist with injury, illness, or work-life balance, (2) to increase productivity and morale, and (3) to manage medical benefits, risk management, employee assistance programs, and other services such that they promote health and productivity. Keys to the success of HPM programs include health promotion and wellness staff who serve as models of healthy lifestyles, employee empowerment, and self-responsibility. The distinguishing factor of HPM programs is the tie to the mission of the business and articulation of the links between individual health and business operations.

Wellness and fitness programs typically focus on the promotion of positive health and/or the prevention and resolution of health risks. Inherent in these themes are the perspectives of health as the presence of positive states or health as the absence of illness. Both psychology and medicine have historically focused primarily on preventing health risks and healing disease and illness, and consequently, early wellness and fitness interventions followed within this tradition. Recent calls have been made, in contrast, for a focus on health defined as the presence of the positive in both mind and body. The positive psychology movement, pioneered by Martin Seligman and colleagues, emphasizes psychology as a science of human strengths, some of which lead to flourishing and others that act as buffers against illness.

Reflecting this movement toward a more positive view of both physical and mental health, wellness and fitness programs are increasingly including components that promote resilience and positive health as well as the management and identification of health risk factors. Thus the content of these programs includes both health-enhancing activities as well as health risk management activities that encompass health in its broadest definition. Among the goods that are essential to positive human health are having a purpose in life, quality connections to others, and positive self-regard. Aristotle long ago proposed that the highest of all human goods was the realization of the individual’s true potential, which he described as eudaemonia. Wellness and fitness programs thus belong squarely within the realm of career development, as the career facilitates all of these goods. Development of these goods requires the effort of both individuals and organizations.

In addition, the emphasis on health has grown to include not only individual health but also organizational health, as articulated in the preceding section. Healthy organizations consider multiple levels of health (individual, group, and organization). They promote organizational congruence, or fitness, between the organization and its external environment, and between components within the organization.

In summary, a broader, more positive view of health has evolved. This comprehensive view emphasizes positive health, along with health-risk management, and encompasses both healthy individuals and healthy organizations.