Aleksić Mirić, Ana Bogićević Milikić, Biljana Janićijević, Nebojša Abstract: COVID-19 pandemic had a deeply disturbing impact on organizations in different sectors around the world, forcing them to quickly adapt and find new, flexible forms of organising and functioning in order to achieve their goals and social roles, while simultaneously enabling the required level of employee and client protection. The main organizational challenges included (1) fast organizational redesign through reconsidering high and low priority tasks and critical roles and key positions, job redesign, regrouping units and cross-functional teams, developing effective decision-making under various scenarios, introducing flexible and remote work options and redefining mechanisms to coordinate and control the activities of different units, as well as (2) new focus in people management by ensuring effective communication with employees, organising safe work environment for employees who cannot work remotely, preparing for increased absenteeism (due to school and other forms of quarantine), responding effectively to the increased stress burden on employees and life-work imbalance, preparing temporary succession plans for key executives and critical roles; also, introducing new leadership styles, providing necessary trainings and regular payroll payments, etc. Individual, as well as organisational ability to overcome obstacles, to adapt positively and to bounce back from adversity became one of the qualities that make a difference. This quality is defined as “resilience”. The term resilience has been applied in recent years at individual, group, organizational, interorganizational and societal level as to address the ability to cope with often sudden and dramatic changes while maintaining positive adjustment under pressure and capacity to learn and to act upon a call. Driven by the idea to identify, describe, explain, and systematize the effects of COVID-19 pandemic impact on managing organizations and people, we designed a research using a questionnaire with 2 171 answers collected from the end of March till the beginning of May 2021, during the pandemic and overlapping changes that kept bringing to the forefront the question “Аre we to adopt ’’the new normal’’? The main idea of this paper is to explore organisational resilience during the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Serbia and to discover the most effective organisational responses that best served organisations, employees and the community. The basic assumption is that organisations in various sectors have adapted to work in pandemics by changing the standard task design, organisational structures, systems, routines, HRM policies and practices. This organisational change was forced by an external threat to people’s lives, under the pressure of emergency reaction and without prior preparation, and to the best of our knowledge, it differs from the previously developed and accepted models of organisational change during the crisis. We question if organisational resilience is an important organisational quality in the enduring crisis, how organisational resilience is interrelated with other organisational qualities and explain how firms can develop capacity for resilience as a part of preparation strategy for future unpredictable crisis. Organisational resilience during the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Serbia : Experiences and recommendations for the future. info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceProceedings http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode application/pdf 166604 bytes eng Post-COVID19 in SEE and Black sea region : responses towards SDGs : 17th ASECU conference : book of proceedings, Belgrade, 13-14. September 2021 https://phaidrabg.bg.ac.rs/o:30128 2022 Keywords: Crisis; Changes; Organisational resilience; “The New Normal”; Serbia