Telework centers: real telework?

Does using a telework center really count as telework?

After all, people who go to the centers have to get dressed and drive to an office rather than work from home in sweatpants and T-shirts. When the General Services Administration announced it was defunding more than a dozen telework centers in the Washington, D.C., area, many of our readers said the money was misspent anyway.

But a few championed the centers.

“Telework centers are a great alternative to teleworking from home,” one reader wrote. “A center has an office environment with other people seriously doing their job and not far from home. So the commute is reasonable and the distractions from home are kept at a good distance.”

“With the distractors at my abode, there is absolutely no way I could telework from home,” another said.

But the flipside was expressed in comments like this one from Dave K: “Only a federal bureaucrat would propose building alternate government-managed floor space to save money on government-managed floor space!”

“Telework centers are a stupid idea,” another reader wrote. “If you want to call it a branch office, fine, but it is not actually telecommuting. How could it save any significant money to add a bunch of branch offices?”