In a Forrester study, Invisible resources are the secret weapon for growth, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, JP Gownder, shows that it is possible to innovate to enable business success, while cutting costs at the same time.

Technology, in the form of intelligent software that increasingly leverages artificial intelligence, could help leaders access a variety of internal and external resources that are powerful and useful, but that lie out of sight, to cut costs, drive innovation and delight beleaguered customers.

Digital innovations can bring these invisible resources into plain sight – for example, using Chunker, the Airbnb of warehouse space, to lease out unused space on a just-in-time basis, or creating an internal marketplace for real-time skills uptake and job tasks using software like Hitch.Works or ActiveOps.

Since layoffs can be counterproductive to business goals, and harm the employee experience (EX) of remaining workers, in another Forrester report, Three adaptive workforce strategies for Covid-19, Gownder gives the following advice:

Redeploy talent inside your company.

By prioritising flexibility and empathy, firms set themselves up for success now and in the future

At Forrester, we believe that engaged employees, supported by empathetic leaders, situated in an organisational environment that motivates the workforce to become customer-obsessed — all of it backed by the tools and technologies to manage that workforce strategically — will be a differentiating factor in determining not just which companies survive this current crisis but which ones go on to create the employee and customer experiences of the future.