How to circumvent standard mark as read setting

[jazzmozz]

My employer has decided to disable the mark as read setting (after clicking on an email automatically mark it as read) in Outlook (MS Office 365 ProPlus; version 1808) because he wants his employees to consciously process our emails. I find this patronizing and very annoying because I have to click every mail or set of mails to mark it/them as read.

Isn't there a workaround (VBA?) to achieve the same result? Alternatively is there a possibility to automatically mark a message as read after having moved it to a folder?