Quick Question - Any way to add roles to Email step in workflow?

For my task assigments I'm using roles for easier administration.

There are times where I want to send a message to the same recipients without assigning a task so I'm using the 'Email' step. Annoyingly it seems the recipient field on the 'Email' step doesn't allow selection of a role for receiving the message. 

This means if I want to add a user to receive a task and receive emails I'll need to add them to both the role, and hardcode them directly in the workflow. The other option is to configure a distribution group for the email side of things but it still means group administration needs to be done in 2 places. Workflow Roles and Distribution Groups. 

Is there any way of getting roles into the email step?

Also, I realise I can work around this by assigning a task with a notification and a very short expiry time but this seems like a really simple function that shouldn't require workarounds like this.