The Irish Times
How to beat the competition
Drumming could be a good way to boost morale at work.
Angela Long reports

Phones are ringing, people are arguing, e-mails you don¹t want keep popping up, time is short, work is piling upŠ.How do you get relief? You bang your drum, or your bongos. Or you shake your maracas.

In no time at all you¹ll be feeling so much better, even beaming at the idiot in human resources you clashed with at the budget meeting, because now his darabukas ­ Middle Eastern drums ­ are chiming in so well after your booming intro.

Samba for stress, the louder the and more carnival the better, is the business solution being embraced by big Irish companies such as Irish life and AIB and even the more peacefully inclined glencree center for reconciliation.

The man leading the band is Dave McFarlane, percussionist, veteran of numerous groups and the brains behind a venture called Teamsamba. He tells me how he got senior managers and trainee pups to bang together. "I was asked to do a workshop for a theatre about three years ago, people were coming up to me afterwards, saying ŒI¹ve been having a really bad week, but now I feel great!¹ They were getting rid of all their frustrations. So I took the idea to corporate situations, companies like Dell, and now it is really catching on."

AIB's offices on Adelaide road in Dublin had a 20-week course in Samba percussion, says trainee executive Kate Quane. "It was great, we really enjoyed it and it was very good for team-building." Staff at PFPC, a fund manager at the Irish Life center, were looking for a Brazilian music group to play at their end-of-summer party when they heard about Teamsamba, says fund accountant Sile Loughrey. "At first some people were against it, but our managing director, Joan Kehoe, was very enthusiastic and promised to get ten managers on board if we could get as many rank-and-file staff." They had three practice sessions before their gig night at the party, in the Landsdown road entertainment room. "It was such a success some of the guys are going to learn drumming properly."

"Anyone can do this," he says." I¹ve had people especially in the corporate work, come up to me before hand and say; ŒLook I cant do this.¹ Either they are too embarrassed to play drums before their collogues or they think they have no musical ear, no rhythm. I say, yeah, yeah, because I know, firstly, everyone can do it, and secondly, it is so much fun everyone will want to join in."

Samba, of course, is very egalitarian music. "It is great to have an executive on a pair of shakers, and a junior employee on a big drum!" says McFarlane. Sile Loughrey reinforces the point, if not so gleefully. "It was so good to have managers and ordinary staff all playing together and people who would normally never talk getting to know each other." With a bang.