What is company integration management (BEM)?
Company integration management (BEM) is a legally required process in which employers work with sick employees to clarify how incapacity can be overcome, recurrence prevented, and the job preserved. The legal basis is § 167 (2) SGB IX. It is explicitly an open-ended search process – there is no prescribed measure.
Possible outcomes range from adapting the workplace to a phased reintegration or organisational changes.
When is a BEM mandatory?
The employer must offer a BEM once an employee has been unfit for work for more than six weeks (42 calendar days) within twelve months – continuously or in several phases. It applies to all companies regardless of size, to all employees (not only severely disabled people), and the 12-month window is rolling.
The BEM meeting: step by step
- Invitation in writing, explaining goals, process, voluntariness and data protection.
- Consent: the BEM only starts with the employee's explicit agreement.
- Initial meeting: joint review of stressors and what helps the return.
- Measures: concrete steps (workplace adaptation, reintegration, training, transfer).
- Implementation & follow-up with an effectiveness review.
- Documentation in a separate BEM file, kept apart from the personnel file.
Voluntariness and data protection
For employees the BEM is voluntary; declining must not cause disadvantages. Health data is subject to strict protection (Art. 9 GDPR), collected only with consent and kept in a separate BEM file.
BEM and illness-related dismissal
Under settled BAG case law, a properly offered BEM is a de facto prerequisite for a valid illness-related dismissal. Without one, the employer faces a high evidentiary hurdle in court.
BEM, mental health and prevention
No national statistic reports what share of BEM cases has psychological causes. What is documented is the link through absence duration: mental illnesses cause the longest absences at 32.9 days per case (DAK Gesundheitsreport 2025, data year 2024, reference: DAK members) and therefore trigger the six-week BEM threshold disproportionately often. Within mental illnesses, depression accounts for the most absence days; burn-out is not an F00-F99 sick-leave diagnosis and does not appear separately in this statistic. BEM, however, only acts after illness. The more effective – and legally required – lever is prevention: the psychological risk assessment under §5 ArbSchG uncovers psychological stressors before they cause illness and BEM cases. Learn more →
