Maintaining cleanliness is a top priority in facility management, and industry standards play a crucial role in ensuring high building hygiene levels. Two key organizations, APPA (formerly the Association of Physical Plant Administrators) and ISSA (Formerly the National Sanitary Supply Association) Worldwide Cleaning Industry Association), provide essential guidelines for cleanliness and maintenance. However, their methodologies and standards differ, which can lead to confusion. This article breaks down the key differences when comparing ISSA vs. APPA Cleaning Standards to help you navigate their unique approaches.

APPA: A Focus on Operational Excellence

APPA's "Custodial Guidelines" are particularly influential in educational settings, from K-12 to higher education. Their core focus lies in establishing a structured framework for managing custodial operations from staffing levels to cleanliness standards. Rather than solely emphasizing specific cleaning techniques, APPA delves into:

• Levels of Cleanliness: APPA defines five distinct levels of cleanliness, providing a clear benchmark for facility managers. These levels guide the development of cleaning schedules, staffing levels and quality assurance protocols. For a better understanding of the APPA Scoring levels, you can read our blog post on Understanding APPA Scoring Levels.
  
  
• Operational and Staffing Management: APPA's guidelines offer comprehensive guidance on staffing based on square footage, resource allocation, and overall custodial management, ensuring efficient and effective cleaning operations. This is typically based on the workload and cleaning protocols for the facility and room type around what is feasible for a custodian to clean.
  
  
• Quality Assurance: APPA provides processes for conducting audits and inspections, enabling facilities to monitor and maintain desired cleanliness standards. These inspections help internal teams build in on-going quality inspection programs and are also used by APPA certified trainers to measure facility cleaning quality.
  
  

Essentially, APPA provides a roadmap for how to manage a cleaning program, with a large focus on the level of clean that is needed and the resources required to reach that level.
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ISSA: Emphasizing Measurement and Validation

ISSA takes a broader approach, catering to the entire cleaning industry, including commercial, institutional, and educational facilities. While this can be used by internal cleaning teams at higher education institutions and other facilities, it is also heavily focused on service companies such as building service contractors. Their standards prioritize:   

• Measurement and Monitoring: ISSA emphasizes the importance of quantifying cleaning effectiveness. They provide tools and resources for measuring cleanliness levels, enabling facilities to track progress and identify areas for improvement.  
  
  
• Standardized Processes: ISSA promotes the implementation of standardized cleaning processes, ensuring consistency and efficiency across operations. This includes cleaning protocols, standard cleaning times across cleaning activities and other benchmarking materials.
  
  
• Industry-Inclusive Applicability: While APPA's guidelines are heavily utilized in education, ISSA's standards are applicable across a wide range of industries, reflecting the organization's broader scope. These industries include building service contractors, education, hospitality among others.
  
  
• Cleaning Time Standards: ISSA shares and updates cleaning time standards versus square footage standards for cleaning tasks that can be used to accurately estimate the time needed to clean various spaces.

ISSA is focused on how well the cleaning is completed, and provides the tools to measure that. It is often used by service providers such as building service contractors to more accurately bid and service facilities based on the square footage, room types and cleaning protocols required by the facility.
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Incorporating Cleaning Measurement Into Your Operations‍

It is crucial to recognize that APPA and ISSA standards are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they often complement each other and can be used in concert to better improve the efficiency and quality of our cleaning operations.
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As organizations look to improve their cleaning operations, both APPA and ISSA offer great tools and data to benchmark and measure on-going cleaning performance. The question is how to implement and utilize these resources in your strategy. Here are a few ways to get involved and use these associations.

Benchmarking your Cleaning Strategy
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Both APPA and ISSA have great data on the effectiveness and efficiency of cleaning operations. APPA provides an easy-to-use and described framework for benchmarking and measuring your cleaning quality across buildings (learn more about APPA with our APPA Cleaning Standards Guide).
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One of the most popular and most useful research in the cleaning industry is the ISSA Cleaning Times publication. This provides a detailed look into cleaning standards and times for general cleaning tasks that can be a great basis for janitorial workloading and staffing levels needed based on the cleaning requirements and frequencies needed in your facility.

Using Technology to Improve Quality and Daily Performance
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While both organizations provide good industry level data to review, they do not supply the daily internal data required to consistently improve performance of your cleaning operations.
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Digital software that provides Daily Cleaning Validation and/or Quality Assurance Inspections are a great way to begin building your own data baselines for cleaning activities around appropriate workloading, cleaning times, square footage requirements and quality scoring across your building portfolio.
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Most of these technology solutions should also offer the ability to conduct and digitize quality inspections based on APPA and ISSA cleaning standards to give you a historical view of cleaning quality performance.

Training Your Team on Cleaning Standards
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Both standards also provide great resources on how to train and set expectations with your teams for training on cleaning work. While this can be created internally based on the research provided by these organizations, there are also many certified trainers who can help to build and guide training for your custodial teams.
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While APPA and ISSA serve different purposes, both organizations play important roles in promoting cleanliness and hygiene. By understanding their respective strengths and utilizing their resources effectively, facility managers can build better cleaning programs based on industry standards.
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However, these standards are only as good as the on-going day-to-day operations done by your cleaning staff. Using technology can help to enable these standards and ensure the strategic decisions made using these standards are being reflected daily to improve cleaning quality and on-going performance.