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Monday, December 26, 2011

Working with annoyed but satisfactory employees (cross functional)

I've been looking at job postings lately and have had a few chuckles when I see problems with compound adjectives, whether hyphenated or solid. [To get technical, it's an adjectival phrase. The links do a great job describing the proper usage.]

The specific copy got to me today was a description of responsibilities. The sentence read "Work with cross functional and virtual teams." What it says is that the teams are annoyed, but organized in functional and virtual teams; it is unclear if the virtual teams are cross.

Simply stated, this makes much more sense with a hyphenated compound word, cross-functional. I'd be much happier working with a team like this. "Work with cross-functional and virtual teams."