VP of People Experience uses holistic people strategy aligned with business results to keep organization primed for change
Stefanie van Hooijdonk has come a long way in HR — both professionally and geographically.
She says she got her start as a junior HR consultant in the Netherlands, her native country, before starting her Canadian HR career at an international mining company. Now, she’s the Vice-President of People Experience at Prospera Credit Union in Surrey, B.C.
“Going to the credit union space, that was a big cultural change in how HR approached their workforce,” says van Hooijdonk.
At Prospera, disruption and change has been turned into a discipline, and that shift is reshaping how the organization thinks about performance, culture, and growth, according to van Hooijdonk.
Single people strategy aligned with business results
Van Hooijdonk says that her team is treating challenges such as mergers, digital transformation, and diversity as parts of a single people strategy where employee experience, community purpose, and business results are expected to move together rather than in isolation.
That mindset is grounded in the realities of the credit union sector, where community impact is inherent to their co-operative values. Van Hooijdonk believes that this context forces her HR team to design from the perspective of the whole person. “Credit unions are community-focused and purpose driven, but our employees are members, too,” she says. “That strongly influences how you look after your workforce from an HR perspective, being a caring employer and really working with the employees with a holistic HR strategy.”
Van Hooijdonk believes that applying a holistic view has sharpened how Prospera positions HR has a partner with the other leaders in the organization. She’s watched the long-running debate about whether HR is sitting at the leadership table move from theory to reality, yet she’s clear that proximity to power is meaningless if HR is treated as a spectator. In many organizations, HR leaders may attend executive meetings but still sit metaphorically off to the side, wondering whether they have been invited as a courtesy or as “a full-fledged, respected partner,” she says.
For her, the difference now lies in evidence rather than rhetoric about HR’s value, and she points to the growing recognition that “highly engaged workforces are more productive.” At Prospera, HR doesn’t have to fight to gain access because it’s already treated as a genuine strategic business partner integral to the overall performance of the business, according to van Hooijdonk.
Building change muscle through back-to-back mergers
That strategic posture has been tested in a compressed period of rapid change. Prospera merged with another credit union Jan. 1, 2020, triggering years of integration work that exposed every weakness in the organization’s ability to lead people through disruption. Van Hooijdonk says leadership set itself up for resilience by not treating each wave of change as a one-off event, she says.
In 2022, Prospera set up a change management office and began auditing its change acumen annually while tracking a change management index built from engagement survey statements. Those measures have shown “exponential increases” in both the index and the audits, tangible evidence that the organization has been “maturing over the years” instead of just surviving integration noise, she says.
“As part of Prospera people experience function, we have our change management office within that, so I’m responsible for leading the change management function as well,” says van Hooijdonk. She says the organization uses the Prosci methodology — a structured, research-based approach to managing the people side of organizational change that focuses on driving adoption at the individual level, helping them move through key transitions.
“One of the other things that we've done as part of that change function is not only look at how we manage large projects that have significant people impacts, but approaching that from a mindset and resilience perspective with the more emotional component of change management as well — and I think that's been pretty unique to our journey,” says van Hooijdonk.
This discipline now matters again as Prospera moves into another deal, this one much larger. The organization recently announced a historic three-way merger with Coast Capital Savings and Sunshine Coast credit unions that will create Canada’s largest national purpose-driven credit union following regulatory approvals expected in the first half of 2026.
Van Hooijdonk acknowledges that “mergers are already difficult” and adding two more partners multiplies the stakes for employees absorbing structural, cultural, and role changes. Members voted in favour in July, and Prospera has responded with a steady schedule of communications and training intended to keep people on the inside of the story rather than watching from a distance.
Training Tuesdays, Convo Corners at Prospera
“As part of preparing the workforce for so much change and ongoing change, we've done a ton of change management training and most of that has been provided in-house. We have focused on creating specific touchpoints through many channels to stay extremely close to our employees,” says van Hooijdonk.
She says Prospera has filled its calendar with touchpoints such as “Training Tuesdays” and in-person “Convo Corner” sessions that send senior leaders out to branches and departments. Over the past year, the organization has run more than 100 of the latter and hosted weekly Training Tuesday sessions, while building an in-house one-day program called Leading Through Change, which more than 100 people leaders have completed to strengthen their own resiliency mindset and their ability to guide teams through uncertainty, she says.
Those investments are tracked through data rather than anecdotes, and the same change index that has climbed year-over-year shows that results have increased significantly as training and communication have scaled, says van Hooijdonk. She notes that this visibility creates its own pressure because “if you do a good job on the change management front, you set the bar really high for yourself and now your employees are demanding that they are kept in the loop all the time — that's been an interesting byproduct of all of this because we're obviously getting deeper into the pre-integration planning.”
That demand now collides with the reality of pre-integration planning for the three-way merger, as leaders juggle deeper behind-the-scenes work with the expectation that communication will match the fast pace set before that pivotal member vote on July 7, 2025. Prospera’s People Experience and Communications teams are trying to maintain that standard at a time when time is a constraint and the organization is juggling rigorous planning with the obligation to keep employees informed, she says.
DEI embedded, not bolted on
While merger headlines dominate, van Hooijdonk says that Prospera’s culture work can’t depend on project timelines. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are embedded in the organization’s values to ensure it’s “a great place to work for all,” she says, adding that the aim is for everyone to feel like they belong and pointing to the development of a network of five employee resource groups.
Among those groups, she highlights one called Tapestry, which focuses on newcomers to Canada and aims to ensure the workplace is welcoming for employees for whom Prospera may be their first Canadian employer. This creates space to share “bumps that newcomers to Canada experience when they first start working in Canada,” says van Hooijdonk. Other groups include a Pride network, one for Indigenous employees, a women’s network, and a group that supports employees and their loved ones with disabilities — all of which are open to everyone without limits on membership.
Those groups drive a steady stream of webcasts and information sessions through the year, covering topics such as mental health for men, perimenopause and menopause, and imposter syndrome, and they continue to attract large voluntary attendance, according to van Hooijdonk.
Van Hooijdonk’s team has been a key part of Prospera’s transformation – a reflection of how she has seen HR’s role evolve, both within the context of her organization and globally. “I've really seen over the last five-to-10 years that HR is earning that seat at the executive table and they’re seen more as a strategic business partner that’s integral to the overall performance of the business,” she says. “Research showing that highly-engaged workforces are more productive is starting to really be recognized and respected — there's proof in the pudding.”
