Campbell & Bigger, 2008
In 1992 APPA published a seminal work titled Custodial Staffing Guidelines for Educational Facilities. The work was based on a concept that was in the embryonic stage in 1986 and then grew in momentum through 1988 when the APPA Board of Directors commissioned a task force to address custodial staffing issues at institutions of higher education. The Guidelines became so popular that it was revised in 1998. The two editions addressed a critical need in facilities management at educational institutions. Even though institutions were growing in size and in delivery of services, custodial staffing budgets were either staying static, or in many cases, decreasing. In other words, each custodian was being asked to clean more square feet than ever before. The facilities managers did not have an empirical document to fall back on that indicated how many custodians were really needed to complete the tasks at hand and the impact of such on productivity or cleanliness.
