Diversity In The Workplace Matters—Especially In Healthcare Marketing
How do I feel about diversity? Simple: I think it’s critical for any healthcare marketing team that is responsible for communicating to consumer audiences.
This may sound like a sweeping statement, but there’s a reason for it. You don’t want to have any blind spots in what you communicate.
This means you need people looking at whatever you’re communicating—whether it’s website content, social media content, etc.—from all angles. This is especially important in the first stage of content development, which is generating ideas for a wide range of audiences.
It comes down to this: If you want to have a rich pool of ideas to appeal to a tapestry of target markets, you need people from all different types of backgrounds.
How Do You Define Diversity In The Workplace?
I think of diversity in several ways. There is the obvious way, which is cultural or ethnic diversity. Our cultures contribute to our worldviews, our beliefs, and our perception of reality.
In this industry, you don’t want to surround yourself with a bunch of carbon copies. That’s what creates the blind spots. The result? You could end up saying something ridiculous. It’s a simple matter to have someone on your team who says, “No, that will never fly with (Target Market A) because (X, Y, Z).”
It comes down to breaking outside your comfort zone, in two key ways: Surround yourself with people who are not like you, and invite them to challenge you.
This means being mature enough to have conversations with people who don’t think the way you do—and being mature enough to listen, even to viewpoints you disagree with.
This ability to listen and be listened to boosts your strength as a team, and it can make the ideas, products, and services you offer that much better.
Building A Diverse Healthcare Marketing Team
I love being around people who are not like me. And I love that our team is diverse in a lot of different ways: our political beliefs, our cultural backgrounds, our economic backgrounds, our ages.
And we don’t have to hold back or suppress our beliefs in the office just because we’re different.
This gives us agility in how we approach our work. When we approach clients with ideas and content strategies, they often comment on how they would never have thought to approach it the way we did—and that’s a good thing.
I also think of diversity in terms of our career backgrounds. I had one job for a year before starting CareContent. Most of my work background consisted of my going to school and traveling. And that has a huge bearing on how I approach our team and the work we do.
Nicole and Jennifer come from buttoned-up, corporate backgrounds. Sammi’s passion is theater—acting and singing. Ros’s gift is creative writing. Linyi might as well be a professor.
All of that makes for a nice range of high notes we can strike—different ways we can pull together ideas and present them in a unique way. Video, infographics, animation, podcasts, compelling patient narratives—all of this and more is part of our creative “mix.”
And despite—or maybe because of—our different backgrounds, we all somehow ended up interested in healthcare.
No matter what kind of cultural background you come from, no matter what your ethnicity is, no matter what your socioeconomic status is—at some point, you are going to encounter the healthcare system.
Everyone on our team has had experiences with healthcare—and that’s why we’re here. We decided we wanted to help our clients improve the healthcare experience for everyone.
We are committed to doing our part, and using our talents and gifts as communicators to make healthcare a little bit better by creating great content for our clients. Contact us to find out how we can help you meet your healthcare marketing goals.
