Pushy management about a talk

[Floraltie]

At work the management have a guest speaker coming onto Teams to do a talk. I personally do not agree with the talk as it does not take into account other views and is very biased and a blaming culture.

We had 4 different managers send emails yesterday telling everyone to attend if they can to get the numbers up as this woman is rarely available. I don’t know why they feel the need to push this agenda onto people. Do I just put Teams on and mute it and do something else? I don’t need a gaslighting talk.

for me the topic isn't that interesting/the biggest part.

It is the push to attend something in the lunch break. So my attitude is "meh, it's my unpaid lunch break"

If the reply is "take your lunchbreak afterwards, please come" i may reconsider. But unless it is obligatory i agree with pp that management have invited a (possibly contraversial) speaker and are now panicking about image because nobody has registered to attend. They need to think about their attitude.

We have a lot of awareness sessions of all types at work. They are not compulsory and nobody says anything if you don't attend unless it's eg new law and you need to know about it - an example might be preventing money laundering. But if it's eg for Black History Month or social mobility (or trans awareness) it's up to you if you dial in or not.

If anyone does ask did you attend you just say "oh I was really busy working on something I'll catch up on the recording oh was it not recorded, that's a shame"

Would you have sessions about money laundering law during your lunchbreak though?

I wouldn't attend. If asked I would say I didn't agree with their views.

There was a 30% turn out and 3 out of the 4 managers who hounded people to attend did not attend as they were on annual leave. Lots of managers were conveniently on annual leave. I had it on silent and did some other work.

Sounds like it wasn’t wanted in the first place but that someone put those managers up to it. Was it a kind of equality and diversity thing where the managers had to toe the line?