You can tell your bosses that a bunch of random people on the internet think they’re being unreasonable nutcases.
That’s not being a jerk but instead being a poor manager.
Most if not all email clients have a receipt feature where when someone opens an email you have sent them you get back a message giving you the time and date of the opening.
If I were in charge, it would be standard policy to acknowledge all emails, but I surely would make sure it was a known policy. I don’t like to wait hours just to know if my employee has even received the email or not. Maybe I’d prefer John take the assignment, but I’ll settle for Mark. Or something.
Plus it’s just more polite. IMO, of course.
…with an email reply? which would then in turn have to be acknowledged?
In many workplaces, announcements and information are conveyed by sending out mass emails to all of the dozens or hundreds of employees. Do you really want to get hundreds of replies to every communication?
Sometimes sending an email to a small group of people asking for something results in the recipients just assuming someone else to respond. I ran into that this week when I was but one of seven people to receive an email so I just ignored it until we received another email and I went ahead and took care of it. So I don’t think it’s entirely crazy for your boss to prefer you to respond to those types of emails.
But, no, I certainly don’t expect a response for every email I send out. Someone at work sent out a company wide email from our HR mailbox to more than 3,500 employees in Outlook marked read receipt. It was very annoying having more than 3,000 messages telling me that someone read that email. On the other hand it was quite illuminating because we were getting read receipt messages for seven months after sending the email.
Yes, I have heard of read recipes…
But that functionality is available on many, but not all platforms. That didn’t work with Outlook on Macs at the time, which was the platform I used.
Anyway, I was the manager and it was the system that worked best for me managing the work I had to do- it wasn’t that much to ask and shouldn’t have required multiple requests over a long time to have it occur.
I was on a committee trying to improve performance reviews, and this was one of the biggest complaints. Most bosses don’t want to cause conflict by saying anything negative - until they are forced to by the review process. (Too many bosses don’t want to say anything good, either.)
It’s good to schedule meetings to check - but no guarantee that you’ll get an honest answer.
No, I’d tell them at time of hire.
And I suppose there are limits to what I’d like an acknowledge on, but as long as it doesn’t overwhelm me, no worries.
OK, never hire people who have to concentrate in order to do their jobs.
Grrrr. This is a major annoyance with my husband. He never simply acknowledges anything. I text him “Can you pick up the boychik? They want me to work late.”
He can’t do it, so he just doesn’t respond, and I don’t know whether he didn’t see the email or text, didn’t receive it, or is trying to clear it with his supervisor, and will get back to me.
Which obviously, my texts and emails to my husband are.
But the supervisors emails may not be mass texts sent to 100 people-- they may be sent to 10 people.
I’m actually going with “Not enough information to solve.”
Since we don’t know exactly who the initial group of recipients is, we don’t know if the supervisor is waiting for a negative response from everyone before turning to another source for people to do whatever the task is.
But yeah-- the “surprise” at the evaluation was bad form. This should have been brought up much earlier.
The team was very small at this point, just 3 people. Regardless of the number of recipients, I still feel like many responders in this thread are missing my point about the language of the question. The question is "Who has time to… " or "Who knows about… "
Very simply, no matter whether its a manager or a family member or friend asking, to me this question format does not require an answer. If I respond, it means either I am the one who has time, or information, or maybe I am saying “hey I know Steve can help”. If I don’t have time/info, and I don’t know who does, I’m not gonna answer.
Also, I completely agree about surprises at the evaluation. They shouldn’t happen, but with bad managers, they always do.
Do you get that unless you give a definitive “No,” your boss does not know whether you simply can’t do it, or are maybe trying to rearrange your schedule so you can, and will get back to him as soon as you have? How much time does it take to type “Sorry, I can’t”? If he has another resource, but can’t go on to it until he has exhausted his present staff, you leave him hanging.
Granted, it would behoove your supervisor to note in the body of the email to request a reply regardless of response-- which is what I do with my oaf of a husband, who also puts empty ice cube trays back in the freezer, and he still can’t be assed to type “K,” and hit send.
This is the same guy who stops and helps strangers jump start their car. 
In other words, I sympathize with your boss’s situation, but he wasn’t communicating well.
Take my word for it, the guy was a major world class jerk. What I described above was just the tip of the tip of the iceberg, as relevant for this thread. He passed away a few years ago, and the world is a better place for it.
You’re responding to what your boss wrote, and probably not to what he means. He’s being polite - if you really don’t have time, he’s okay with you not stepping up to take on this new task.
How would you feel if he, not getting any responses, dumped it on you. If you complain that you’re too busy, he could say that you never told him you were so he assumed you had time.
Dealing with a boss is as nuanced as dealing with a partner. I’d hate to hear what you say to “does this dress make me look fat?”
Happened to me twice at my last toxic job. If you have to lowball me with my bonus, at least just tell me that the important people need the money more.
This seems to me to be a much better way to handle things, a manager should have a fair idea of the workload their subordinates are under and also who would be best suited to carry out a particular task, simply asking everyone “who has time to do this?” indicates to me that this manager doesn’t have much idea what’s going on in his department
If there were only three people on the team then chances are there weren’t that many emails to respond to. It’s a sick move to wait until evaluation to bring it up when mentioning it early on would save everyone grief.
Of course, a special place in hell is reserved for those who REPLY ALL to say they read the email.
The first part of reassigning people with no thoughts as to what they are already doing is being a poor manager. Giving the workers grief for the results of his own poor management decisions and shifting the blame the them is what makes him a jerk. He was both.