The businesses of tomorrow will not only be defined by the problems they solve – as in, the goods or services they develop and sell – but by their culture. This was the general consensus among participants at the recent Businesses of Tomorrow roundtable co-hosted by The Australian Financial Review and Westpac in Sydney.

The focus on culture is because those businesses will be created by, staffed by and selling to Millennials – loosely defined as those people born between 1980 and 2000 – and for many of them, the workplace culture, and their connection with it, is the most important part of business.

As US-based international retailing expert Donn Carr put it in the famous line, "people work for people – they don't work for businesses". But Andrew Purchas, head of innovation and collaboration at Sydney fintech hub Stone & Chalk tweaks the Millennials' mantra slightly: "They engage me – that's why I work for them."

John O'Mahony, partner at Deloitte Access Economics, says this search for engagement on the part of the people who will populate – and patronise – the businesses of tomorrow leads to a different way of assessing what the businesses of tomorrow will look like.

"I think traditionally the answer to that question was, 'what goods and services are these businesses going to provide? What are going to be the industries of the future?' Now, we're thinking that the characteristics of the businesses of tomorrow will be about how they're run and how they're led," he says.

'Other metrics'

This means that in the future, businesses will be looking at "other metrics" to define their business success, beyond profits. "I think there'll be more businesses that define their success in terms of the engagement of the employees and also their corporate brand amongst their customers as more customers are looking for businesses that are doing something good for society as well.

"In the age of customer activism, I think businesses are going to have to add other metrics to profit to define their success," says O'Mahony. "In the digital economy, it will be critical for a business leader that you manage to imbue the people that work with you and for you with a sense of purpose, of turning up for work beyond the tasks they perform."

O'Mahony says Deloitte research shows that the top three reasons why people want to stay at their employer are: the purpose and a sense of teamwork they experience, that they like their relationships with people with whom they work, and that the work they do has genuine value.

In particular, Deloitte research shows that Millennials focus more on the "positive energy" around a business – what it contributes to the world, how it aligns with their values, and what they aspire to achieve.

Collaboration is also critical, says O'Mahony: Deloitte research finds that employees who regularly collaborate with their colleagues are 11 times more likely to be satisfied with their working environment than those who do not.

"If you walk around the Google campus or the Xero campus or into Ruslan Kogan's business, they're businesses that have flat management structures that empower their employees, that collaborate, and are just constantly thinking about innovating and changing," says O'Mahony. "That's where you get that office environment where people are having spontaneous conversations about new solutions."

'Full employment economy'

The bottom line for employers is that in what is effectively a "full employment economy," people have choice about who they work for, says David Lindberg, chief executive of the Business Bank at Westpac.

"If you have a choice of working for someone whose social contract you admire, whom you think has a higher purpose that you want to be associated with, if you have that choice of course you're going to choose to work for that company," says Lindberg.

He says previous generations have all been largely characterised by a workplace mentality that says, 'I'm there to do a job, I'm working for someone and fun is not really what I'm here for' – but the Millennial generation "thinks that's insane".

Millennials "have no idea what we're talking about," says Lindberg. "They want to get the same value and fun, pleasure and reward, during the day as they want in the mornings and in the evenings. To me, there's this new burden on all of us employers, which is that work has to be intrinsically pleasurable, and if you can't make your work day intrinsically pleasurable to your employees, then Millennials will choose somebody that can," he says.

Start-ups and young companies can design and implement their flat structures, empowerment strategy and workplace culture to adapt to this shift – but larger, more established companies cannot afford to ignore it, says Lyn Cobley, chief executive of the Institutional Bank at Westpac.

"People want a sense of purpose, from their work and the achievements," says Cobley – and it's up to employers to provide that. "Whether it's your gender diversity policy, whether it's the way you run your business and the way you pivot and innovate and whether it's the type of people you're hiring and the enterprise skills or the training you provide them, it's all about having a sustainable franchise," she says.

Hard not soft

The cultural aspects are absolutely critical to a business of tomorrow, says Andy Vesey, chief executive office of AGL, but "never call them 'soft' aspects of a business," he says.

"Culture is not 'soft,' it's measurable and meaningful and it's a 'hard' number," says Vesey. And whatever its size, a business of tomorrow will have an "anticipatory culture," he says.

This anticipatory culture, which enables a business to succeed in a changing world, has six dimensions. "First, there's scenario planning – where you frame various futures. Second, you develop intimate knowledge of your customers, your markets, your stakeholders and technology, and with the insights gained, you place bets on the various futures.

"Third, you know for certain that you're going to be wrong most of the time, so you have to be a rapid learning organisation, that's capable of pivoting quickly. Fourth, effective pivoting requires lean processes, and a flat structure. Fifth, you want responsive supply chain and business partnerships so you can be fluid and never to be trapped as the future changes."

The last aspect is what Vesey calls "responsive portfolio management". "Basically, you need to be able to get in and get out of investments and decisions," says Vesey. "And your culture has to support that.

When Vesey started in business, he says it "could have taken 60 years for a business to be radically challenged" – but now it could take a week. "The world is just much more complicated and a business has to be resilient to survive," he says – and this is where its culture comes in.

"We would say, why is it important to think about cultural diversity and all the other kinds of diversity? Because the more lenses we have on an issue, the better decisions we're going to make. It's not about a societal obligation, it's about survival of the business," says Vesey.