Defining Roles to Break Down Bottlenecks [Silo Wreckers Series, Part III]

Dealing with delays and workflow bottlenecks?

Nary a day goes by without “past due” tasks sitting at the top of a hospital marketer’s dashboard. Often, this is no fault of their own. Marketing workflows overlap with digital, creative, legal, and other teams. Even within the marketing department, one initiative might depend on many specialized teams working together.

This shared responsibility makes accountability squishy. Each team has their own priorities and timelines, and when someone misses a task, it creates a chain reaction that ultimately points a finger at marketing. Then leadership wonders, “Why do our marketing projects keep getting delayed?”

As a result, marketing leaders find themselves constantly chasing people for deadlines (or chasing people to chase people) and dealing with emergencies that derail their focus. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Where cross-functional collaboration breaks down

It takes a range of skills to bring a hospital marketing project from idea to implementation. And the teams that own these skills are often siloed.

Silos are an org-wide challenge. Marketers can help identify silos and foster better collaboration — and we talk about this at length in the other parts of our Silo Wreckers series — but ultimately, you can’t fix your org’s silos alone. And you definitely can’t fix them overnight.

Fortunately, you don’t have to tear down all the silos to work more effectively with other teams. You just need to define ownership within your cross-functional marketing workflows to help collaboration flow more smoothly.

Who owns the puzzle pieces?

Hospital marketing projects are like doing a puzzle when you only have half the pieces. To finish the puzzle, you need the people holding the rest of the pieces. But they may not even realize they have what you need.

For example:

• Web, digital, information technology (IT): The technical magicians on hospital IT teams often deliver exactly what marketing requests, like implementing a specific schema markup. They may not mention missed opportunities, like other important types of schema that marketing doesn’t know to ask for. This scenario happens all the time.
• Patient experience (PX): The team that owns your org’s experience strategy understands it best. When marketing is siloed from that team, messaging doesn’t always align with the patient’s reality or deliver the information they need at every touchpoint. (Read how to close that gap.)
• HR: This team often owns job candidate-facing channels, like the careers site and careers-focused social profiles. What often happens when HR and marketing teams are siloed? Misaligned messaging.
• Compliance: Legal gets the final say on what you say. For certain initiatives that require extra caution — like patient stories or messaging about clinical trials — legal review can significantly delay the publishing timeline.

To finish puzzles faster — and with less chasing of the pieces — document your workflows and the roles within them. Let each team know which pieces they own and what contribution looks like.

Define roles and responsibilities with healthcare marketing governance

You might hear “healthcare marketing governance” and think “red tape.” But this isn’t meant to add bureaucracy; it’s meant to be proactive and keep things moving with less back-and-forth.

Your workflow governance should define these roles at each touchpoint:

• Decision-makers
• Contributors
• Producers
• Owners (who’s responsible)
• Who needs visibility

Some teams document roles and responsibilities using RACI charts (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed). At Aha Media Group, we use swimlane diagrams to give healthcare marketing teams a model of how tasks change hands and loop around to specific team members.

Which roles and workflows should you document first?

Start by defining roles at key intersections where marketing depends on other departments and vice versa.

You don’t need to tackle each workflow at once. Ask your team members where the greatest bottlenecks happen and start there. For instance, the longest delays might be when content goes through legal or clinical review.

It’s essential to customize your workflows to your organization. Every hospital or health system is different — and a generic healthcare marketing workflow template likely won’t work for yours. Your marketing governance model needs to fit your:

• Team structure
• Marketing objectives
• Organization’s dynamic or culture

Need help with marketing workflow documentation?

Aha Media helps healthcare marketing teams identify and smooth out frustrating workflow bottlenecks. During our process, we:

• Interview your team members to understand the pain points, constraints, and nuances of your org
• Reflect back what we heard (anonymously), so that feedback is transparent and open
• Identify opportunities to improve collaboration and maximize your resources (automation is your friend)
• Develop swimlanes and other governance frameworks that fit your real-life workflows, current resources, and strategic needs

Delays and dropped balls happen sometimes, but they shouldn’t be a daily reality. Productive cross-functional collaboration starts with defined roles, documented ownership, and clear expectations — and we’re here to help you fast-track the process of building them.

Let your content machine run itself

Build the right governance to help your workflows actually work (so you can stop turning all the cranks).

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